Into The Wild Final Version

FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA
Into the Wild:

Perpetuating the
American Wilderness
Myth
Magisterská diplomová práce
BC. MICHAELA BUDÍNSKÁ
Vedoucí práce: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Anglický jazyk a literatura
Brno 2023
INTO THE W ILD: PERPETUATING THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS MYTH
Bibliografický záznam
Autor: Bc. Michaela Budínská

Filozofická fakulta
Masarykova univerzita
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Název práce: Into the Wild: Perpetuating the American Wilderness Myth
Studijní program: Anglický jazyk a literatura
Studijní obor: Anglický jazyk a literatura
Vedoucí práce: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Rok: 2023
Počet stran: 95
Klíčová slova: divočina, americká literatura, americká kultura, nonfikce,
divoký západ, transcendentalismus, příroda,
environmentalismus
2
Bibliographic record
Author: Bc. Michaela Budínská

Faculty of Arts
Masaryk University
Department of English and American Studies
Title of Thesis: Into the Wild: Perpetuating the American Wilderness Myth
Degree Programme: English Language and Literature
Field of Study: English Language and Literature
Supervisor: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Year: 2023
Number of Pages: 95
Keywords: wilderness, American literature, American culture, non-fiction,
American frontier, Transcendentalism, nature,
environmentalism
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Anotace
Tato diplomová práce se zabývá americkým pojetím divočiny a jeho projevy v knize
Jona Krakauera Útěk do divočiny, která vyšla v roce 1996. Jejím hlavním cílem je před-
stavit americkou divočinu jako kulturní koncept s bohatou historií a problematickým
odkazem, a následně ukázat, že Útěk do divočiny je typickým příkladem toho, jak je
tento koncept neustále oživován a zvěčňován. V této práci není divočina vnímána jako
přírodní prostor a protipól civilizace, jak tomu bývá obvykle, ale naopak jako odraz
americké kultury a paradoxních mýtů, na nichž je vystavěna.
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Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the American conception of wilderness and its manifes-
tation in Jon Krakauer’s 1996 non-fiction book Into the Wild. Its main aim is to present
the American wilderness as a cultural construct with rich history and problematic leg-
acy, and to argue that Into the Wild is a typical representation of how this construct
continues being perpetuated and reified. Instead of depicting wilderness as a natural
space which functions as an antipode to civilization, this thesis presents it as a reflec-
tion of American culture and the paradoxical myths on which it is built.
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Declaration
I hereby declare that the thesis titled Into the Wild: Perpetuating the American Wil-
derness Myth that I have submitted for assessment is entirely my original work, and
that no part of it has been taken from the work of others unless explicitly cited and
acknowledged within the text of my thesis.
Brno November 28, 2023 .......................................

Bc. Michaela Budínská
7
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel,
B.A. for his guidance and kind feedback which helped me multiple times to calm the
voice of doubt in my head and finish the work that you are about to read.
Šablona DP 3.4.2-ARTS-dipl-obor-anglicky (2022-11-28) © 2014, 2016, 2018–2021 Masarykova univerzita 9

Šablona DP 2.0.1 (9. ledna 2018) © 2014, 2016, 2018 Právnická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 13
2 The Development of the American Wilderness Myth 18

2.1 Early Years: The New World Wilderness as an Enemy ...................................... 19
2.2 From Romanticism to Transcendentalism: The Sublime Aesthetics of
Wilderness ........................................................................................................................... 22
2.3 The Wild West: American Wilderness as a Symbol of National Pride .......... 28
2.4 Wilderness Preservation: Preserving the American Pioneer Experience .. 33
2.5 The Birth of The Wilderness Cult and The Wilderness Society ...................... 39
2.6 Concluding Thoughts ....................................................................................................... 43
3 Into the Wild: The Wilderness Myth Followed and Perpetuated 45

3.1 Christopher McCandless: A Follower of the Wilderness Cult .......................... 48
3.2 Krakauer’s Christopher McCandless: A Portrait of a Hero ............................... 59
4 The Legacy of the (Paradoxical) Wilderness Myth 65

4.1 Constructing the Virgin Land: Removing Humans from Nature..................... 66
4.2 The Wilderness Industry: From Popular to Vanishing Wilderness ............... 70
4.3 Controlling the Uncontrollable Wild: The Necessary Paradox of the
Wilderness Management ............................................................................................... 75
5 Conclusion 82
Bibliography 86
11
Šablona DP 2.0.1 (9. ledna 2018) © 2014, 2016, 2018 Právnická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity
INTRODUCTION
1 Introduction
In April 1992, a young American who called himself Alexander Supertramp decided to
walk into the Alaskan wilderness and commence a battle against the wild pristine na-
ture he was hoping to find there. Excited about finally reaching his destination, the wil-
derness of America’s “Last Frontier” (Kollin 41), he left a note on a piece of plywood:
“AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE
CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CON-
CLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION” (qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163). A couple of
months later, on September 6 of the same year, the decomposed body of the young man
was found by a group of moose hunters in an abandoned city bus beside the Stampede
Trail near Denali National Park in Alaska (Krakauer, “Death of an Innocent“). Since
then, the story of Christopher McCandless, a.k.a. Alexander Supertramp, was trans-
formed into a non-fiction book written by Jon Krakauer and later into a movie directed
by Sean Penn. McCandless’s story became known under the name of Into the Wild and
it became a phenomenon which many could relate to, and which drove multiple young
people to seek their own wilderness adventures.
Commenting on McCandless’s impact, a Czech writer Matěj Balga claims: “Chris se
stal cestovatelskou legendou. Tisíce mladých lidí, mezi nimi i já, začalo stopovat a ob-
jevovat svět, věrni romantickému odkazu tohohle tragického dobrodruha” (“Chris has
become a legend among travelers. Thousands of young people, including me, began
hitchhiking and exploring the world, devoted to the romantic legacy of this tragic
13
INTRODUCTION
adventurer”; my trans. 154). To many people, McCandless, who refused to live in the
materialistic society of 1990s America, became a symbol of courage and resistance. His
escape to the wilderness was viewed as an attempt to search for an alternative lifestyle,
one that was not blunted by material goods, and which provided greater spiritual
meaning and authenticity than life in society. In his essay on Into the Wild, Pete Mason
argues: “Wandering the country . . . with no phone, no car, no cigarettes, serves as a
lesson that the material goods we all cherish and seek to obtain as status symbols are
doing nothing but holding us back from doing what we are truly capable of doing” (92).
In the eyes of his admirers, McCandless was a courageous, independent individual, who
managed to escape the ills of materialism and reconnect with his primal instincts. His
escape from society was viewed as a heroic journey of an individual in search of truth,
and wilderness was the place where he hoped to find it.
The function of wilderness in McCandless’s story—and in American culture as a
whole—is the main concern of this thesis. Even though McCandless is often portrayed
as a unique and remarkable character, his story is not in any way singular. Quite the
opposite, the desire to go to wilderness in order to resist the materialistic forces of
civilization has a long tradition in American culture. Wilderness, although appearing
quintessentially natural, is, in fact, loaded with cultural symbols and meanings. Its
function as a site of independence and resistance where it is possible to achieve spir-
itual transformation and acquire exceptional strength and resilience, has been con-
structed by multiple generations of American adventurers and writers. The main ar-
gument of this thesis therefore is that Christopher McCandless was driven to
14
INTRODUCTION
wilderness by the exact same civilization which he was trying to escape and that the
wilderness which he was seeking, despite appearing natural, is a cultural concept
loaded with myths and paradoxes. Instead of blindly following his lead, the roots of
McCandless’s beliefs should be closely analyzed in order to reveal problematic doc-
trines on which they are built.
The thesis is divided into three sections. The first section, “The Development of
the American Wilderness Myth,” traces the roots of the American conception of wilder-
ness to English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and the ideologically
loaded concept of the American frontier. In this section, it will be argued that, through-
out the years, American wilderness has developed from a chaotic and uncontrollable
wasteland into a site of promise and potential. With the help of Henry David Thoreau,
Walt Whitman, John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner and other wilderness enthusiasts,
the western wilderness has been molded into a desirable romantic landscape and a
quintessentially American phenomenon, closely associated with the pioneer experi-
ence and a resistance to dominant doctrines. Rather than being a neutral natural land-
scape, the American wilderness emerges as a faithful reflection of American culture
and its beliefs.
The second section, “Into the Wild: The Wilderness Myth Followed and Perpetu-
ated,” provides an analysis of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild with an attempt to situate it
as a continuation of the American wilderness myth. This section demonstrates that
McCandless is a follower of the beliefs and ideas presented in the first section, and that
by narrating and romanticizing his journey, Krakauer perpetuates the continually
15
INTRODUCTION
repeated conception of wilderness as a site of resistance and independence. Introduc-
ing the “American wilderness myth” and its development into the analysis of Into the
Wild significantly disrupts the romantic narrative of the book, elucidating the roots of
the sentiments which inspired McCandless to embark on his Alaskan adventure. In this
framework, the story of Christopher McCandless’s escape into the Alaskan wilderness
emerges as a part of a profoundly American phenomenon which continues being per-
petuated in American literature and film.
Finally, the third section of the thesis, “The Legacy of the (Paradoxical) Wilderness
Myth,” reveals the paradoxes of the American conception of wilderness and analyzes
its legacy. It is concerned with the mythical view of wilderness as a virgin land which
requires that people are removed from the landscape in order to create the “wild pris-
tine nature”; it also discusses the issue of the rising popularity of wilderness which
threatens its existence because it drives crowds of tourists into wilderness areas; and
finally, it examines the paradoxical idea of the “wilderness management” which seems
to be inherently contradictory but necessary if wilderness is to survive. The aim of this
section is to argue that the veneration of McCandless’s wilderness adventure is prob-
lematic since Into the Wild perpetuates a precarious wilderness doctrine which con-
tributes to the continual disappearance of American wilderness. The conception of wil-
derness as an uninhabited landscape which functions as a site of freedom and inde-
pendence is ultimately a myth which is unsustainable and therefore should be scruti-
nized.
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INTRODUCTION
Upon conclusion, it should be clear that Into the Wild is not a singular story, but a
small piece of a larger American phenomenon. McCandless’s—and Krakauer’s—ado-
ration of the American wilderness, together with the desire to experience it, is a result
of specific Western concepts which infuse wilderness with spiritual and nationalistic
value and inspire many people to seek their own wilderness adventures. The story of
Into the Wild is thus a part of a larger wilderness narrative which is culturally con-
structed and quintessentially American. Its roots are well-known, well-researched and
thoroughly analyzed, but while multiple scholars have been trying to overcome this
conception of wilderness in order to replace it with a more sustainable understanding,
American writers like Jon Krakauer continue spreading the idea of wilderness as an
uninhabited site of freedom and independence. The American wilderness myth thus
continues being perpetuated and as it drives increasing numbers of people into wil-
derness, it contributes to its vanishing.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN W ILDERNESS MYTH
2 The Development of the American Wilderness Myth
When the journalist Jon Krakauer first learned about Christopher McCandless, the
young American who decided to walk into Alaskan wilderness “in search of raw, trans-
cendent experience” (Krakauer, Into the Wild xix), he published an article in 1993 in
the Outside magazine about the young man’s journey. Reportedly, the article, with its
enticing title “Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in The
Wilds,” “generated more mail than any other article in the magazine’s history” (Kra-
kauer, Into the Wild xxi). The popularity of the story, which reached an even larger au-
dience with the publication of Into the Wild in 1996, can be mainly attributed to the
fact that in American culture, wilderness is an important concept that is heavily loaded
with spiritual and nationalistic meaning.
An environmental historian Donald Worster, who wrote multiple papers on the
significance of wilderness in America, rightly notes that, “[s]omething in American cul-
ture loves the wild and that passion is weaker in other countries” (“Thoreau” 6). On a
similar note, a reviewer of Into the Wild Jonah Raskin writes: “The wild seems to have
come already packaged in the American DNA, and American writers can’t help but hear
its call and walk on the wild side, too” (198). However, while it is certainly true that
Americans are fascinated with wilderness, this passion is definitely not something in-
nate and natural. American wilderness and its widespread popularity should be stud-
ied in historical context, because even though it is so deep-rooted that it appears to be
a part of the nation’s DNA, American fascination with the wild is actually a result of
18
multiple historical forces and ideas. These helped to provide it with the spiritual and
nationalistic value that it carries to this day.
This chapter studies the development of the American conception of wilderness
in chronological order. Starting from the seventeenth century, when the New World
wilderness was still regarded as an enemy, it describes the ways in which culture in-
forms the understanding of wilderness, since the first contact of European settlers with
the New World wilderness up until today. It argues that the American conception of
wilderness is a reflection of multiple ideological doctrines—most importantly the con-
cept of the sublime and the concept of the American frontier—which help infuse it with
significant cultural value. The resulting picture of wilderness is not that of a natural
space, but a cultural one, which is heavily loaded with meaning and symbolism.
2.1 Early Years: The New World Wilderness as an Enemy
Despite today’s widespread enthusiasm about wilderness in America, the New
World wilderness has not always been popular. When English settlers first arrived in
the New World, their view of the wild was far from positive. In his famous essay “The
Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” from 1996, an envi-
ronmental historian William Cronon argues, “[t]o be a wilderness then was to be ‘de-
serted,’ ‘savage,’ ‘desolate,’ ‘barren,’—in short, a ‘waste,’ the word’s nearest synonym”
(8). As Cronon demonstrates, in those times, wilderness was associated with negative
connotations. Far from being a peaceful place to seek, it was perceived as an undesira-
ble wasteland and a source of evil.
19
In his seminal work Wilderness and the American Mind, which was first published
in 1967, Roderick Nash explains that the negative view which early settlers had of wil-
derness can be mainly attributed to the impact of Judeo-Christian tradition, which
largely informed settlers’ beliefs about wilderness (13-15). Hence, they conceived of
wilderness as a perilous and uncontrollable place, the direct opposite of biblical Eden.
As the antipode to Christian paradise, wilderness was seen as a home of the devil and
other creatures associated with hell (Nash 15). In 1662, a Puritan minister and a poet
Michael Wigglesworth wrote a poem called “God’s Controversy with New England,” in
which he captured these early sentiments:
Beyond the great Atlantick flood

There is a region vast,
A country where no English foot
In former ages past:
A waste and howling wilderness,
Where none inhabited
But hellish fiends and brutish men
That Devils worshiped. (1)
The poem portrays the New England wilderness as a wasteland and a home of a devil
which was a dominant view in the seventeenth century. Because of this conception of
wilderness as the place where the devil resided, the early settlers approached it as a
rival who had to be defeated. Their mission was to tame the wilderness and to recreate
the New World in the image of Eden. In the words of Cronon, “[w]ilderness . . . was a
place to which one came against one’s will, and always in fear and trembling. Whatever
value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be ‘reclaimed’ and
20
turned toward human ends—planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill” (8). Wil-
derness, thus, was a negative force and for the English settlers its only value lay in the
potential to turn it into earthly paradise. To “reclaim” meant to take it from the hands
of the devil and Christianize it. Only then could the wilderness be valuable and useful.
In this way, English colonists proceeded towards wilderness armed with Christi-
anity and filled with beliefs that they were fulfilling God’s mission. They saw them-
selves as God’s army and “wilderness was [their] enemy which had to be ‘conquered,’
‘subdued,’ and ‘vanquished’” (Nash 27). These beliefs are clearly portrayed in the third
stanza of Wigglesworth’s poem:
Until the time drew nigh wherein

The glorious Lord of hostes
Was pleasd to lead his armies forth
Into those forrein coastes.
At whose approach the darkness sad
Soon vanished away,
And all the shaddows of the night
Were turned to lightsome day. (2)
The wilderness and the colonists were viewed in dialectical opposition, with wilder-
ness being the darkness filled with “shaddows of the night” (Wigglesworth 2) and the
English colonists bringing the light which could illuminate the darkness and transform
it into something beautiful and valuable. Wilderness could be transformed into a Chris-
tian model, a “city upon a hill” (Cronon 8), but in its untamed, uncivilized form, it had
no value. It was an evil matter which had to be molded and filled with Christian light in
21
order to become beneficial. Hence, for the English settlers, there was nothing positive
about the American wilderness condition in its untamed form.
However, with time something has changed. By the mid-nineteenth century,
American transcendentalists were searching for spiritual truths in the wilderness be-
cause “[n]ature mirrored currents of higher law emanating from God” (Nash 85). Wil-
derness was not a devil’s den anymore, but a place where an individual was closest to
God’s power. Half a century later, John Muir was going to wilderness to “gaze and
sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration . . . humbly prostrate
before the vast display of God’s power” (228). Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Tho-
reau, John Muir, and anybody who shared their beliefs, were resorting to wilderness
“eager to . . . learn any lessons in the divine manuscript” (Muir 228). At some point in
history, wilderness became a site of worship, a cathedral for Nature’s devotees, and it
became filled with unprecedented spiritual meaning. In order to understand this shift,
it is necessary to return to the Old World where, towards the end of the eighteenth
century, a revolution in aesthetics created a ground for wilderness appreciation.
2.2 From Romanticism to Transcendentalism: The Sublime
Aesthetics of Wilderness
At the end of the eighteenth century with the rise of Romanticism in Europe, a new
aesthetic category called “the sublime” was developed. Its philosophical basis can be
located in the thoughts of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant (Nash 45). Writing in
1764, Kant in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime
22
introduced the distinction between the feeling of “the sublime” which “arouses satis-
faction, but with dread” (14) and the feeling of “the beautiful” which “also occasion[s]
an agreeable sentiment, but one that is joyful and smiling” (16). According to Kant,
“[t]he sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peaks arise above the clouds” was sub-
lime (14), whereas “the prospect of meadows strewn with flowers” (15-16) was beau-
tiful. The sublime and the beautiful were presented as two aesthetic categories which,
although being different, were still equivalently worthwhile. The beautiful was the
more conventional aesthetic category characterized by pleasance and order. The sub-
lime, on the other hand, represented an aesthetic revolution, because it took charac-
teristics previously considered appalling and presented them as attractive. Conse-
quently, the characteristics of wilderness which had previously been thought of as
evil—chaotic, uncontrollable and terrifying—started being promoted as aesthetically
pleasing.
Inspired by these philosophies, the English Romantics started celebrating the
power of nature and wild places and reflecting this appreciation in their poetry. They
were preoccupied with mountains, forests and oceans, as well as the solitude they pro-
vided. In their view, “[s]piritual truths emerged most forcefully from the uninhabited
landscape” (Nash 46) and for this reason, wilderness was actively pursued for spiritual
enrichment and inspiration. In wild places, the Romantic poets could discover truths
that were to be revealed to anybody who understood the sublime beauty of wilderness
and had the capacity to recognize the revelations it was speaking. In “Mont Blanc: Lines
Written in the Vale of Chamouni,” Percy Bysshe Shelley writes: “Thou hast a voice,
23
great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood / By all, but
which the wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.” Here,
Shelley gives voice to a mountain to stress the power of nature to reveal deceiving doc-
trines prevalent in the society and replace them with universal truths. In these or sim-
ilar words, English Romantics celebrated wilderness as a site of truthfulness and au-
thenticity which functioned as an antipode to society’s deceit.
Since the “truths” revealed by nature were often distinct from the dominant nar-
rative of Roman Catholicism, the appreciation of wilderness presented a form of reli-
gious non-conformism. According to David Morse, Romanticism reflected “[t]he rejec-
tion of authority in matters of religious conscience” and it was defined by a “cult of
genius and the rejection of rules” (102). In wild places, the Romantic poets could dis-
cover truths that were not derived from an abstract authority, but directly from divine
landscape. Wilderness thus became a place of non-conformity which the English Ro-
mantics could visit to reveal alternatives to dominant ideology, which were not medi-
ated through the church but revealed directly to the individual.
Consequently, when the doctrine of the sublime arrived in the New World, the
wilderness started being viewed in a different light—the same wilderness which had
previously been inhabited by “hellish fiends and brutish men” (Wigglesworth 1), was
now filled with divinity. Nash argues: “It was not that wilderness was less solitary, mys-
terious and chaotic, but rather that in the new intellectual context these qualities were
coveted. European Romantics responded to the New World wilderness, and gradually
a few Americans . . . began to adopt favorable attitudes” (44). Wilderness remained the
24
same, but the new conception of aesthetics made it possible to celebrate, rather than
condemn, its wild characteristics. The notion of the sublime and its celebration in Eng-
lish poetry thus prepared a foundation for appreciation of wilderness in America. It
might have taken longer for the people of the New World to realize that wilderness
could be conceived in this manner, but they eventually started seeing it in a more pos-
itive light.
The first American authors to spread the message of the sublime wilderness
were the Transcendentalists, with Henry David Thoreau in the forefront. Thoreau’s
conception of wilderness was primarily molded by the transcendentalist philosophy
which was a derivative of the English Romanticism. The core belief of Transcendental-
ism was that “natural objects assumed importance because, if rightly seen, they re-
flected universal spiritual truths” (Nash 85). Like English Romantics before them,
Transcendentalists were going to the wilderness because they were dissatisfied with
the dominant doctrines prevailing in the society and they wanted to unveil truth for
themselves.
In agreement with Shelley, Thoreau was searching for unmediated truth in the
wilderness, a truth which was not blunted by authorities and dominant ideologies. The
only difference between Shelley and Thoreau was that Thoreau’s enemy was not Ro-
man Catholicism anymore. In going to wilderness, he was trying to escape the ills of
American society, most notably its materialistic tendencies. In Walden, Thoreau fa-
mously wrote: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table
where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity
25
and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board” (248). In
making this comment, Thoreau was articulating his dissatisfaction with American val-
ues, which favored materialistic abundance and showed indifference to the importance
of truth. Therefore, he decided to go and seek authentic experiences elsewhere. His
search consequently led him to his solitary sojourn at Walden Pond.
Thoreau’s discontent with American society had a significant impact on his con-
ception of wilderness. As Nash claims, “[b]y mid-century American life had acquired a
bustling tempo and materialistic tone that left Thoreau and many of his contemporar-
ies vaguely disturbed and insecure” (86). In the era when most people trumpeted
America’s development and progress westwards, Thoreau’s writing portrayed Ameri-
can society as something which was far from exceptional and exemplary. In his texts,
he was repeatedly reflecting the view that civilization was malfunctioning, and wilder-
ness posed an antithesis to its unhealthy values. In “Huckleberries” Thoreau writes:
“Most men, it appears to me, do not care for Nature, and would sell their share in all
her beauty, for as long as they may live, for a stated and not very large sum” (43). In
these words, he criticized the materialistic tendencies of his fellow Americans and the
disregard for nature which it produced.
Apart from disapproving of materialism, Thoreau also viewed American society
as constraining, and he saw its rules and laws as limits to one’s liberty. Wilderness, on
the other hand, was, in his view, a site of ultimate freedom. According to Thoreau, wil-
derness offered “absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and cul-
ture merely civil” (“Walking” 657). Society was an obstacle to true liberty and the
26
freedom which it provided was “always contrived, measured out and circumscribed”
(Worster, “Thoreau” 9). In the words of Worster, Thoreau communicates that “[t]he
better kind of liberty . . . thrives beyond the reach of the authorities” (“Thoreau” 9) and
his sojourn in the wilderness can therefore be perceived as an “escape from politicians,
the state, society, prejudice, authority—all the faces of unfreedom” (Worster, “Tho-
reau” 9). Ultimately, Thoreau’s wilderness is conceived as the site of non-conformism,
in a way similar to the Romantics. It is a place where one can go to escape the con-
straining forces of the church (as English Romantics did), the sickness of American so-
ciety (as Thoreau did), or, most importantly, the constraining power of the Old World.
The non-conforming aspect of wilderness played a major role in its appreciation,
which was used by the Americans at a critical moment when they needed to articulate
their non-conformity with British rule. When Americans declared their independence
and started looking for ways to inspire national pride, they used the wilderness as a
means to show the Old World that they were becoming a new nation which was
younger, stronger and better. When Americans adopted their Declaration of Independ-
ence on July 4, 1776, they started searching for ways to distinguish themselves from
their European ancestors. They “sought something uniquely ‘American,’ yet valuable
enough to transform embarrassed provincials into proud and confident citizens” (Nash
67) and they found it in the wilderness. They could not compete with the rich history
and artistic achievements of Europe, but they had one significant asset—the abun-
dance of wild landscape (Nash 67). Wilderness was already prized and celebrated by
Europeans and it “had no counterpart in the Old World” (Nash 67), which made it an
27
ideal candidate for being infused with nationalistic meaning. The concurrence of Ro-
manticism and American independence thus ultimately resulted in wilderness becom-
ing a symbol of American national pride. This symbol became known as the Wild West.
2.3 The Wild West: American Wilderness as a Symbol of National
Pride
As a symbol of national pride, the American West became charged with positive
connotations. The appreciation of western wilderness became Americans’ articulation
of their separation from the Old World and the movement towards it was simultane-
ously a movement away from the past. Since it was supposed to be something which
differentiated Americans from their European ancestors, the West had to be filled with
exceptional attributes. In his book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth,
Henry Nash Smith states that “[t]he Wild West was [seen as] . . . an exhilarating region
of adventure and comradeship in the open air. Its heroes bore none of the marks of
degraded status. They were in reality not members of society at all, but noble anarchs
owning no master, free denizens of a limitless wilderness” (55). In making this com-
ment, Smith is showing how the West was being presented as a region worthy of na-
tional pride and also as a place of independence and freedom. As the “noble anarchs
owning no master,” Americans were renouncing the Old World and seeking to define
themselves on their own terms. Wilderness was therefore again being understood as a
place for nonconformists who were abandoning their “master,” this time represented
by the Old World, and searching for alternative truths.
28
While the West was being presented as the direction of freedom and independ-
ence, the American East was being constructed as its opposite. The East represented
the connection with the Old World, whose value lay mostly in its rich history, whereas
the American West was filled with possibility and novelty. Its wild condition meant
that its story was still to be told and it represented the possibility of a great future. In
the words of Smith:
the Atlantic seaboard . . . represented the past, the shadow of Europe, cities, so-
phistication, a derivative and conventional life and literature. Beyond, occupying
the overwhelming geographical mass of the continent, lay the West, a realm where
nature loomed larger than civilization and where feudalism had never been estab-
lished. (48)
Americans believed that with each step into the wilderness they were moving away
from the Old World and moving towards the new American nation. Thus, the West,
together with its wilderness, functioned as a liminal space in which Americans could
shed their European origins and redefine themselves as a new and better people.
Apart from celebrating the sublime qualities of wilderness, Thoreau, in some of
his writings, also expressed his beliefs in the transformative potential of the American
West. His appreciation of the Wild West is most apparent in his essay “Walking,” where
he contrasts the East with the West, viewing the former as the direction of the past and
the latter as the direction of the future:
Eastward I go only by force; westward I go free . . . the future lies that way to me,
and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side . . . I should not lay
so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the
29
prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and not to-
ward Europe. And that way the nation is moving. (Thoreau, “Walking” 662)
Here, Thoreau expresses the view, which was prevalent at the time, that the American
West is preferable because it is filled with potential and novelty. The West is where the
future lies while the movement towards the East is a direction of the past and stagna-
tion. Thoreau continues: “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art
and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with
a spirit of enterprise and adventure” (“Walking” 662). For Thoreau, the West is prefer-
able because it is new and rich with possibilities. It is also a place of freedom and indi-
vidualism where one can strip oneself from the “forces of unfreedom” (Worster, “Tho-
reau” 9), whether they are represented by the Church, the Old World, or the American
society.
Thoreau thus in his writing encompassed both the notions of sublimity and the
ideas of the American frontier. He was both “a crusader on his way to the Holy Land”
and “a true American pioneer, participating in the westward movement” (Worster,
“Thoreau” 7). This only shows that in Thoreau’s lifetime, the concepts of the American
West and wilderness were closely related. Thoreau clearly articulates this connection
when he writes: “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and . . .
in Wildness is the preservation of the world” (“Walking 665). In Thoreau’s writing the
Romantic notion of sublime wilderness and the patriotic symbolism of the West as the
site of potential emerged as two tightly linked concepts. The American West and wil-
derness were one and the same and they promised an exceptional future for all Amer-
icans, whether pioneers or Transcendentalists. For Thoreau, they offered a possibility
30
to escape the dominant values of American society and revise them. Wilderness func-
tioned, firstly, as a liminal space between the Old World and the New, and secondly, as
a space where dysfunctional American values could be revised and transformed into
new and better ways of conduct.
Such transformation was often being undergone by an individual. Thoreau saw
wilderness as “the source of vigor, inspiration and strength” (Nash 88) and in his view,
“[h]uman greatness of any kind depended on tapping this primordial vitality” (Nash
88). In the words of Worster, “[w]ilderness, Thoreau argues, is not a waste land but a
natural resource. It makes people stronger, in mind as well as in body. It feeds virtue.
It makes people humble. It yields poetry and philosophy that are independent and cre-
ative, free of a sickly artificiality” (“Thoreau” 8). The people who came to the western
wilderness and were tried by its wild nature became, in essence, people of exceptional
characteristics. The men who were responsible for the transformation of the Western
wilderness into the civilization of the New World became known as the American pio-
neers.
Consequently, the figure of the pioneer, also known as the frontiersman, became
a literary hero of multiple books and poems. In Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O
Pioneers!,” frontiersmen were portrayed as exceptional individuals, youthful, manly
and muscular. As the conquerors of the West, they were seen as heroic figures. Whit-
man wrote: “We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, / We the
youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend” (197). In these words, Whitman was
depicting frontiersmen as young men of extraordinary qualities who were exemplary
31
for other nations. They were “impatient, full of action, full of manly pride” (Whitman
197) and as such, they were just as youthful and honorable as the whole of the Ameri-
can nation. Whitman’s pioneers were thus a true reflection of the freshness and
strength of America.
Apart from celebrating the pioneers, Whitman also contrasted them with the peo-
ple of Europe: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wea-
ried over there beyond the seas / We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the
lesson, / Pioneers! O pioneers!” (197) In contrast with American pioneers who were
constantly advancing and renewing themselves, the people of the Old World— “the el-
der races”—were stagnating. As they advanced along the western frontier, American
pioneers were abandoning their past and embracing their manifest destiny: “All the
past we leave behind, / We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, /
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, / Pioneers! O pio-
neers!” (197). In this poem, Walt Whitman captured the prevalent sentiment of his age,
the dominant belief in the exceptionalism of the New World and its people and the re-
lated belief that Europeans were lacking the possibility of constant advancement and
renewal. In Whitman’s view, the future was in America and, more specifically, it lay in
the American pioneers.
In short, it was a shared belief of Whitman and Thoreau that wilderness had an
ability to produce extraordinary individuals. Although their visions differed slightly—
Whitman’s focus was mostly on youthful and manly characteristics of frontiersmen
whereas Thoreau was emphasizing mainly intellectual and spiritual transformation—
32
their desire to go to wilderness had the same roots. Essentially, they shared a view that
the wilderness experience was a path towards improvement and greatness. But de-
spite their shared reverence for wilderness, Whitman and Thoreau had very different
visions for America and its future. Walt Whitman’s dream was to continue the Ameri-
can expansion to the Pacific and beyond (Smith 50), whereas in Thoreau it is possible
to discern the seeds of future preservationism.
In 1860, Thoreau’s “Huckleberries” are already lamenting the vanishing wilder-
ness: “Thousands annually seek the White Mountains to be refreshed by their wild and
primitive beauty—but when the country was discovered a similar kind of beauty pre-
vailed all over it—and much of it might have been preserved for our present refresh-
ment if a little foresight and taste had been used” (Thoreau 44). Despite his celebration
of the West and its symbolism, Thoreau was aware of the destructive forces inherent
in the American development and progress. Hence, he expressed his critical view of the
American civilization in his writing, and by doing that, he was essentially foreshadow-
ing what was to come next: the era in which wilderness was to become endangered by
America’s development, and the westward movement would be no longer plausible if
America wanted to keep at least the remnants of its wilderness.
2.4 Wilderness Preservation: Preserving the American Pioneer
Experience
In the late nineteenth century, another shift came, and it caused a significant
change in thinking about wilderness. In 1893, the American historian Frederick
33
Jackson Turner delivered a speech called “The Significance of the Frontier in American
History.” The speech, which had subsequently become known as the Frontier Thesis,
is now regarded as one of the seminal texts in American culture and history (Smith 4).
In it, Turner talked about the American frontier as the main formative influence on
America and its national character:
American social development has been continually beginning over again on the
frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion west-
ward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of prim-
itive society, furnish the forces of dominating American character. (32)
Turner was only articulating what others before him already suggested but he voiced
clearly and unmistakably that the frontier was what made Americans Americans: “The
frontier [was] the line of most rapid and effective Americanization” (33). In Turner’s
conception, the wilderness was, once again, seen as a liminal space where Americans
were abandoning their past and renewing themselves. It was fostering the character-
istics which were closely associated with Americannes like “individualism, independ-
ence, and confidence in common man that encouraged self-government” (Nash 146).
The conquest of wilderness was therefore the frontiersman’s rite of passage, a passage
from the European settler to an American.
However, right after presenting the frontier as the distinguishing facet of Amer-
ican life, Turner declared the frontier closed: “And now, four centuries from the dis-
covery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the
frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of America’s history”
(60). He thus first presented the frontier as the source of American national attributes,
34
only to tell his readers that there was no frontier anymore, and therefore no further
opportunity for Americanization.
Once he articulated the end of the frontier in this manner, many Americans were
reluctant to let the “first period of [their] history” go. Thereupon, Frederick Jackson
Turner created a ground—although it was not his intention—on which preservation-
ists could build their call for saving the remnants of American wilderness. As Cronon
argues, “it is no accident that the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness
areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the same time that laments about the
passing frontier reached its peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to
protect the nation’s sacred myth of origin” (13). In other words, to preserve the possi-
bility of undergoing national rebirth and becoming American—as the frontiersmen
did—wilderness needed to be protected. The preservation movement was conse-
quently, at least partially, built on the same national foundations which were previ-
ously aiming to destroy wilderness and transform it into a controlled landscape con-
structed for human use.
While Turner was awakening nostalgia in the patriots who were lamenting the
loss of the pioneer experience, the preservationist John Muir was continuing in the tra-
dition of Romanticism and Transcendentalism and portraying wilderness as a sublime
landscape. For example, Yosemite’s South Dome was “all spiritualized, neither heavy
looking nor light, steadfast in serene strength like a god” (Muir 226). Wild landscapes
were covered with “spiritual glow” (Muir 219) and Muir was observing them “humbly
prostrate before the display of God’s power” (Muir 228). For him, the wilderness was
35
primarily a site of spirituality, and his view of the landscape was a pantheistic one, with
God living “on this earth, within nature [as an] indwelling power, a creative force, a
flow of energy” (Worster, “John Muir” 12). Although this view of wilderness may seem
very different from the frontier view, there are certain aspects in which they intersect.
In his chapter on John Muir, Donald Worster claims that for Muir, wilderness was a
source of “personal liberation,” a place where he “freed himself from all career anxie-
ties, all family obligations, and all questions about his national loyalties that plagued
him during the American Civil War” (“John Muir” 10). Muir was going to wilderness to
escape the status quo and find freedom, and in this way, he was searching for the same
kind of independence and individualism as English Romantics, American Transcenden-
talists and pioneers.
Driven by the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Worster argues that there is a tight
link between American democracy and the nature religions of people like Muir and
Thoreau. In his view, “democracy . . . encouraged people to seek in nature, rather than
in traditions of church authority, a source of order, virtue, spirituality, and value. De-
mocracy was in love with nature, and pantheism was its true religion” (“John Muir”
12). In essence, wilderness offered an escape from multiple constraining forces which
could have a form of the Old World rule, Christianity, American government, or any
other ruling body the individual desired to flee from. In any case, wilderness was a
place where one could define oneself on one’s own terms—a place which fostered the
“dominant individualism” of the American intellect (Turner 59). Therefore, “it affected
particularly anyone who was dissatisfied with the power of churches, clergy,” and any
36
other “received doctrines” (Worster, “John Muir” 12). The wild landscape of America
was being constructed both by the advocates of the frontier and of sublimity as a limi-
nal space where one could escape from the dominant views and redefine them in order
to fit one’s personal beliefs. It was a place, as Thoreau proclaimed it, of “absolute free-
dom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil” (“Walking”
657). In essence, the advocates of nature’s sublime beauty were searching for the same
liberty which the followers of the frontier doctrine found enticing. There was not, after
all, a significant difference between the two streams of thinking about wilderness.
As a leading preservationist, Muir was not only trying to escape the constraining
doctrines of the Christian church, but also attempting to capture and promote the gran-
deur and sublimity of the American wilderness with an aim to gain public support for
its protection. In her essay “John Muir, Yosemite, and the Sublime Response,” Christine
Oravec claims: “Though such writers as George Catlin and Henry David Thoreau had
expressed a concern for preservation, no one before Muir had succeeded in forging that
concern into effective appeals to a national public” (245). In a way similar to Thoreau,
Muir was criticizing the destructive tendencies of American civilization and he offered
wilderness as an escape. However, he did so with a clear intention—to publicize wil-
derness recreation and promote its values in order to create allies for the preservation
movement. And as Nash states, “[a]s a publicizer of the American wilderness Muir had
no equal” (122). When publicizing wilderness, Muir was promoting mainly wilderness
recreation and trumpeting its spiritual and intellectual values for Americans. His cen-
tral aim, and the aim of the early preservation movement, was not to preserve
37
wilderness as such, but to preserve the American wilderness experience—whether it
was the pioneer experience or the experience of the sublime effect of American wilder-
ness.
Wilderness was therefore being preserved for two principal reasons. Firstly, as
Wallace Stegner put it, it was preserved as “a wilderness bank” (148) or a sort of a
museum, where the American national history was being preserved and where the
young Americans who never experienced frontier life could get a taste of what condi-
tions the American pioneers had to endure. Secondly, it was preserved as a “cathedral”
(Cronon 12) or a “temple” (Nash 125). There, the followers or Thoreau and Muir could
satiate their spiritual longing and reveal the basic truths of existence. In any case, the
central goal of wilderness preservation was to save wilderness to give Americans a
chance to experience it. Even though the discussion was about saving nature, human
need was always at the center.
After successfully promoting the idea of wilderness recreation, which resulted
in the creation of America’s most visited national parks, Muir wrote that “[t]he ten-
dency to wander in wilderness is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken,
over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going
home; that wildness is a necessity” (48). The American wilderness was preserved for
the recreational use of the civilized men and “by means of good roads [it was] being
brought nearer civilization every year” (Muir 49). It was made “accessible and availa-
ble to tourists seeking escape from care and dust and early deaths” (Muir 54), but as it
was being adapted to human recreation and made accessible through roads and
38
railroads, it was moving further and further from the original idea of a chaotic, uncon-
trollable and uninhabited—indeed sublime—wilderness. In the words of Cronon, “[a]s
more and more tourists sought out the wilderness as a spectacle to be looked at and
enjoyed for its great beauty, the sublime in effect became domesticated” (12) and con-
sequently, wilderness became civilized. The popularization of wilderness and its
preservation for human recreation might have been necessary if the American society
with its cultural baggage of manifest destiny was to be persuaded about its inherent
usefulness, but the resulting image of wilderness was far from its original sublime
grandeur. Nevertheless, Muir’s mission to popularize the wilderness experience was
successful and by the twentieth century, many people were beginning to search for
their own wilderness adventure.
2.5 The Birth of The Wilderness Cult and The Wilderness Society
As the wilderness experience became popular, it started to permeate American
culture and literature, and consequently, many young people began actively seeking
the transformative experience of wilderness adventure. Nash calls this phenomenon
“the wilderness cult” (141-160) and he argues that “by the early twentieth century ap-
preciation of wilderness had spread from a relatively small group of Romantic and pat-
riotic literati to become a national cult” (143). As a typical example, Nash offers Joe
Knowles who “had gone into the woods to be a primitive man for sixty days. He took
no equipment of any kind and promised to remain completely isolated, living off the
land” (Nash 141). Commenting on the story of Joe Knowles, James Morton Turner
39
argues that “central to Knowles’ adventure . . . was a preoccupation with masculinity
common in turn-of-the-century America. [Wilderness adventure] promised to return
the enervated city-dweller to the mythical frontier . . . reaffirming both his masculinity
and Americanness” (466). Joe Knowles’ adventure was thus a result of the deep-rooted
doctrine of the value of the American frontier. Knowles went to the woods driven by
the desire to recreate the pioneer experience and acquire the heroic characteristics of
American frontiersmen.
The notion of the sublime also survived in the wilderness cult. In 1934, Everett
Ruess, an American whom John P. O’Grady described as “another teenager in search of
himself . . . overwhelmed by desire, a romantic who escaped the city” (1), disappeared
in the Canyonlands National Park, leaving only a note scratched on a rock: “NEMO
1934” (O’Grady 1). A follower of Thoreau and Muir, Everett Ruess was searching for
the sublime effect of wilderness and for a spiritual renewal that it promised. “His pur-
suit of beauty,” O’Grady claims, “became a journey toward the self” (4). Like Thoreau
and Muir before him, Ruess’s principal reason for leaving the civilization was the belief
that nature will bring him closer to the truth of existence and that he will be able to
transform himself spiritually. He consequently became known as the “vagabond for
beauty” (O’Grady 10), although a more fitting moniker would probably be a “vagabond
for sublimity”. At any rate, Everett Ruess’s story reveals that the romantic notion of the
sublimity of American wilderness survived to the twentieth century, and it continued
to inspire young Americans to seek wilderness for spiritual transformation.
40
In 1935, a group of preservationists, who decided to continue what John Muir
started and fight for a legal protection of wilderness, formed The Wilderness Society.
Their stated purpose was “fighting off the invasion of the wilderness and . . . stimulating
. . . an appreciation of its multiform emotional, intellectual, and scientific values” (qtd.
in Nash 207). Notably, the emotional and intellectual values of wilderness were in the
forefront. Robert Marshall, one of the leading figures of The Wilderness Society,
claimed that “[t]he benefits which accrue from the wilderness may be separated into
three broad divisions: the physical, the mental and the esthetic” (142). In accord with
the frontier thesis, Marshall argued that wilderness is necessary for building “individ-
uality and competence” (143) and that the wilderness experience produced “America’s
most virile minds” (143). By promoting the “esthetic importance of the wilderness”
(Marshall 144), he then included the spiritual values of the wild landscape arising from
the notion of the sublime.
The other members of The Wilderness Society offered similar arguments. Sigurd
Olson virtually repeats the claims stated in Turner’s Frontier Thesis when he writes:
“The greater part of the old wilderness is gone, but during the centuries in which we
fought our way through it we unconsciously absorbed its influence. Now as conquering
invaders, we feel the need of the very elements which a short time ago we fought to
eradicate” (99). Such continual perpetuation of the same argument—the theory that
the conquest of wilderness formed the American character—only helped consolidate
the belief that wilderness was necessary if Americans wanted to keep fostering their
individualism, self-sufficiency, originality and virility.
41
The fact that the members of The Wilderness Society included scientific values in
their statement of purpose can be mainly attributed to Aldo Leopold. Inspired by the
new science of ecology which “enabled him to conceive of nature as an intricate web of
interdependent parts” (Nash 195), Leopold advocated for a new, non-anthropocentric
ethics which he termed “the Land Ethic” (qtd. in Nash 197). In his view, “[t]he Land
Ethic . . . simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters,
plants, and animals, or collectively the land” (Leopold, qtd. in Nash 197). However,
even though he was preaching a radically new conception of ethics and thus preparing
the ground for future environmentalists, Leopold’s ecological arguments remained
only marginal in the preservation movement. And like others, he was also not immune
to the well-established frontier doctrine. In his “Wilderness as a Form of Land Use,”
Aldo Leopold argues:
There is little question that many of the attributes most distinctive of America and
Americans are the impress of the wilderness and the life that accompanied it. If
we have any such thing as an American culture (and I believe we have), its distin-
guishing marks are a certain vigorous individualism combined with ability to or-
ganize, a certain intellectual curiosity bent to practical ends, a lack of subservience
to stiff social forms, and an intolerance of drones, all of which are the distinctive
characteristics of successful pioneers. These, if anything, are the indigenous qual-
ities that set it apart as a new rather than an imitative contribution to civilization.
(Leopold 401)
Repeating the same beliefs again and again, in various forms and phrases, the members
of The Wilderness Society helped reinforce the conception of wilderness as a place de-
signed for human needs. It was a place which people sought to foster their
42
individualism, satiate their spiritual longing, or rebel against social rules and norms.
The wilderness which The Wilderness Society managed to preserve in this way was a
cultural construct heavily loaded with the meanings and ideological beliefs which it
acquired throughout history—from the first English settlers to 20th century wilder-
ness enthusiasts.
2.6 Concluding Thoughts
In 1964, the Wilderness Act was adopted, establishing a National Wilderness
Preservation System. The stated purpose of the Act was to “secure for the American
people of present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wil-
derness” (“The Wilderness Act of 1964” 120). The American wilderness has thus been
preserved primarily for human use. It can be perceived as a result of the long cultural
debate influenced by English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Turner’s
Frontier Thesis, John Muir’s writings and many other cultural productions which per-
petuated the idea of wilderness as a means for fostering exceptional physical, emo-
tional and intellectual characteristics. As such, it is a much more cultural than natural
resource. In the words of William Cronon: “Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind
a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the
mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in
fact we see a reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires” (7). In making
this comment, Cronon is arguing that the American wilderness is a reflection of Amer-
ican culture. Instead of being a neutral natural resource, it is heavily loaded with
43
meaning which it acquired throughout American history. This culturally burdened wil-
derness continues to entice young Americans to venture into the wild landscape, rec-
reate the primitive pioneer life, dive into the sublime mountain beauty, revolt against
social norms, and ideally return home stronger, freer and better. That is perhaps what
Christopher McCandless, the young man on whose story Into the Wild is based, was
trying to do when he embarked on his Alaskan Odyssey.
44
INTO THE W ILD: THE W ILDERNESS MYTH FOLLOWED AND PERPETUATED
3 Into the Wild: The Wilderness Myth Followed and
Perpetuated
According to Krakauer’s account in Into the Wild, Christopher Johnson McCandless was
raised on the East Coast of the United States, in a small town called Annandale in Vir-
ginia. He was a son of an aerospace engineer Walt McCandless who, together with
Christopher’s mother Billie, ran a prosperous small business. He spent his childhood
in the comfort of an upper-middle-class family where he never had to worry about the
lack of finances. Despite the comfortable and privileged life, soon after his graduation
from Emory University in 1990, McCandless disappeared without leaving a note to his
parents or anybody else. He spent two years traveling around the United States, spend-
ing a lot of time in South Dakota, Arizona and California, and meeting many people
along the way. But his ultimate goal was Alaska, where he wanted to experience his
“final and greatest adventure” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild). In 1992,
when he was twenty four, he departed from a margin of American civilization in Alaska
and hiked alone into its wilderness. He spent nearly four months in an abandoned city
bus—which he called “Magic Bus” in his personal journal (McCandless, qtd. in Kra-
kauer, Into the Wild 163)—near the Stampede Trail, living off the land and eating what
he gathered and killed. After 113 days in the Alaskan wilderness, he died, allegedly
after eating poisonous wild potato seeds.
Like many other young people who perished during their wilderness adventures,
McCandless would remain unknown were it not for the American journalist Jon
45
Krakauer who decided to record his story and investigate what led him to his lonely
death. The story was first published as an article in the Outside magazine in 1993 and
later as a book called Into the Wild. After Krakauer published Into the Wild in 1996, it
quickly became a hit which “spent more than two years on the New York Times best-
sellers list” (Merino 9). With time, its impact proved to be enduring, the “book attained
the status of a classic [and] it became required reading in many secondary schools”
(Roberts 87). Krakauer’s account of McCandless’s story, and later also Sean Penn’s film
adaptation which brought it to an even larger audience (Merino 9), helped transform
the young adventurer into a hero. “The Magic Bus” in which McCandless died, was con-
verted into a shrine and its symbolism was being continually enlivened and reified by
the “hundreds of pilgrims [who] annually [made] their way . . . to the bus” (Roberts 89).
The vehicle, and the young hero with whom it was associated, were converted into
symbols of freedom, independence, and resistance. And even though the bus is no
longer placed in its original location, it continues to carry the symbolism to this day,
enticing many visitors who can now visit it in the University of Alaska Museum of the
North (Osborne) where it is currently located.
Since Christopher McCandless did not survive to tell his story, the only way to
write his biography was to assemble the pieces of information which were available
after his death. While writing the book, Krakauer interviewed the members of
McCandless’s family as well as the people he met on his journey. He also consulted the
young adventurer’s journals, letters and written notes which were found in the bus
where he died (Hanssen 191-192). The result is a narrative which is built on
46
McCandless’s thoughts and beliefs, but which required a significant intrusion of the
biographer. Into the Wild is therefore a reflection of McCandless’s and Krakauer’s be-
liefs alike.
This chapter is divided into two parts. The first part provides an analysis of the
most significant piece of writing that McCandless left behind, a short but exhaustive
manifesto in which he summarized his ideals. The analysis of the manifesto will
demonstrate that McCandless can be viewed as a typical follower of the American wil-
derness cult who was driven to his Alaskan sojourn by the culturally and ideologically
loaded wilderness doctrine. The second part then examines Krakauer’s input and the
way he portrays McCandless as a hero and his adventure as a romantic journey which
reflects American passion for wilderness and risk, and thus perpetuates the American
wilderness myth. Even though Into the Wild was published both as a book and as a film
by Sean Penn, the focus will be primarily on Krakauer’s book, since Penn’s film mostly
mirrors Krakauer’s vision and repeats his ideas.
The aim of this chapter is to argue that what drove Christopher McCandless into
wilderness was the American wilderness myth, understood as the idea that wilderness
is a site of freedom and independence where spiritual truths are most readily accessi-
ble. As had been presented in the first chapter of this thesis, the wilderness myth de-
veloped from a variety of cultural forces, becoming a blend of concepts like nature’s
sublime aesthetics, Transcendentalism, the Wild West and the American frontier. Kra-
kauer’s Into the Wild serves as an example of how the wilderness myth continues being
47
reified and perpetuated, which explains why it is still surviving in the era in which it is
becoming increasingly difficult to find wild places.
3.1 Christopher McCandless: A Follower of the Wilderness Cult
In 1990, when Christopher McCandless decided to leave the constraints of
American society and go search for freedom and truth in Alaska, the American wilder-
ness had already been molded by decades of ideological fashioning into a symbol of
independence and authenticity. The clues that McCandless was searching for this so-
cially constructed wilderness are many, but they are best summarized in the manifesto
which he engraved on a piece of plywood and left at the bus where he spent most of
his Alaskan sojourn. It reads:
TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGA-

RETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE
HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN,
‘CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS
COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL
THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL REV-
OLUTION. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING
HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZA-
TION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE
WILD.
ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP
MAY 1992
(qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163)
48
In the one short paragraph, McCandless—signed by his pseudonym Alexander Super-
tramp—managed to encapsulate all the most significant characteristics of the Ameri-
can wilderness idea: the preoccupation with aesthetics and spirituality, the dissatisfac-
tion with civilization, which is viewed as materialistic and degenerate, the positive
view of wilderness as the site of absolute freedom, and the veneration of the American
West. As such, the manifesto alone is exhaustive enough to situate McCandless in the
American wilderness cult.
In the manifesto, McCandless repeats the ideas which were born in the era of Ro-
manticism by putting significant emphasis on the aesthetic and spiritual aspects of his
journey. He calls himself “AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer,
Into the Wild 163), a moniker which underscores the importance of the aesthetic facet
of his adventure, and he claims that his ultimate goal is to achieve a “CLIMACTIC BAT-
TLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIR-
ITUAL REVOLUTION” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163). Noting the sim-
ilarity of his beliefs to the ideas of Romanticism, David Vann, in his “Introduction” to
the 2018 edition of Into the Wild, likens McCandless’s words to poems by William Blake
(x). However, while the Romantic sentiments are present in McCandless’s manifesto,
his views and beliefs seem to be much closer to those of American Transcendentalists,
most notably Thoreau. Based on the books that were found in McCandless’s literary
collection, among which Thoreau was present, Krakauer calls McCandless “a latter-day
adherent of Henry David Thoreau” (28) and, in a couple of instances, likens his unwill-
ingness to comply with society’s rules and laws to Thoreau’s political views, mainly the
49
ones expressed in the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (28). But apart from
the resistance to rules, McCandless and Thoreau also share the persistent search for
truth and freedom, as well as the dissatisfaction with American society and its materi-
alistic tendencies.
In a way similar to Thoreau, McCandless perceives wilderness as a place where he
can achieve the “ULTIMATE FREEDOM” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild
163) away from America’s predominant materialism. Driven by his disgust of the civi-
lization which he perceives as poisonous, McCandless regards life in wilderness as the
symbol of resistance to civilized life. One of the books found among McCandless’s pos-
sessions was Walden, in which he highlighted this passage: “Rather than love, than
money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in
abundance . . . but sincerity and truth were not; and I went hungry from the inhospita-
ble board” (Thoreau, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 117). McCandless’s writing, as well
as his actions, seem to suggest that he shared Thoreau’s views of civilization as a place
where truth is the most blunted. Nature, on the other hand, was seen as a site of sin-
cerity and authenticity. As has previously been demonstrated in the first chapter, by
the twentieth century, this dialectical understanding of wilderness and civilization was
well established in American thought. The predominant conception that Americans
have of wilderness was well summarized by Cronon: “Wilderness is the natural, un-
fallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom
in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of
our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity” (16). This is
50
the view which McCandless inherited from his culture and which inspired him to sep-
arate himself from the American society and embark on a journey that would lead him
to nature’s truth.
As a way of signaling his separation from the materialistic tendencies of American
society, McCandless abandoned most of his possessions. A non-conforming individual
for whom materialism provided no answers, he decided to live with “NO PHONE, NO
POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163).
Before leaving his home in Atlanta, he took twenty-four thousand dollars from his col-
lege fund and donated all of it to “OXFAM America, a charity dedicated to fighting hun-
ger” (Krakauer, Into the Wild 20). Very early on his journey across America, he also
abandoned his old yellow datsun (Krakauer, Into the Wild 26), leaving all his belong-
ings inside it, and “in a gesture that would have done . . . Thoreau . . . proud,” as Krakauer
claims, he “arranged all his [remaining] paper currency in a pile . . . and put a match to
it” (Into the Wild 29). In her essay on Into the Wild, Caroline Hanssen writes: “In both
the movie and the book versions of Into the Wild, McCandless is portrayed as a young
man who found solace in the natural world, away from the hegemony of American ma-
terialism” (193). Abandoning his belongings and deciding to survive with absolute
minimum was McCandless’s manner to announce that he is setting himself apart from
the materialistic tendencies that he perceived as poisonous.
His separation from home and society was also accompanied by a change of name
which he used as a way of discarding his previous identity and announcing his detach-
ment from the life he had been living. His manifesto is not signed by his birth name
51
Christopher McCandless, but by the pseudonym which he created for himself: “ALEX-
ANDER SUPERTRAMP” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163). As Krakauer
writes in the book: “To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he
even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was
now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny” (23). By adopting a new name,
McCandless was virtually taking control of how he would be seen and defined. Instead
of letting others—namely his parents and the American government—define who he
was, he underwent a metaphorical rebirth and created an identity which was com-
pletely free of external control.
The act of renaming oneself deserves attention because names have historically
been connected to structures of power and wilderness enthusiasts like McCandless
sometimes use them to signify their severance from society. In the words of Gisli Pals-
son, personal names serve as “means of domination and empowerment, facilitating col-
lective action, surveillance, and subjugation” (618). Names are never neutral, which is
true both for personal names and place names, and one’s name can reveal a lot about
the person’s cultural and historical background. Palsson continues: “Naming involves
powerful speech acts, making history, constituting persons and the social relations and
systems within which they are embedded - communities, states, and empires” (620). A
name situates a person within society, and it represents a linkage to specific commu-
nities and structures of power. Adopting a new name is thus an act of resistance by
which the individual rejects the social relations which the name signifies. Naming
52
oneself is an act of becoming one’s own and achieving more control over how one is
defined.
Among wilderness enthusiasts, McCandless is not the only one who used renam-
ing as a way to define himself on his own terms. In his essay “Call of the Wild”, Joseph
M. Kramp likens McCandless to the American poet William Stafford who shares his rev-
erence for nature and believes that it “somehow heals our wounds, teaches us how to
live, and ultimately offers a means to attaining personal peace” (Kramp 64). Like
McCandless, Stafford adopted a moniker in order “to express his deviant identity”
(Kramp 64) and he called himself “The Wanderer” (Kramp 64). In a similar manner,
Everett Ruess, an American youth who fled into wilderness and in 1934 disappeared
somewhere among the canyonlands in Utah (O’Grady 1), changed his name multiple
times and eventually decided to call himself “Nemo,” (O’Ģrady 1), the Latin for “no one.”
Writing about Ruess’s name changing, O’Grady states: “The bestowing of a name is a
cultural act, establishing the individual’s place in the community . . . The individual who
seeks to escape the name, the identity, can do so only by becoming ‘no one,’ NEMO.
Herein lies the individual’s genuine freedom.” (14). Although McCandless did not be-
come “no one,” he nevertheless attempted to free himself from an identity that was
connecting him to the family and society which he desired to escape. Unlike the name
Christopher McCandless which connected him to his family and the American society
as a whole, the moniker Alexander Supertramp was free of any such associations.
After adopting the new name and thus separating himself from the American
society and deciding to define himself on his own terms, McCandless started his
53
journey towards greater freedom and self-reliance. In Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer fit-
tingly called his manifesto “an exultant declaration of independence” (163), which is
appropriate both because it emphasizes McCandless’s search for personal autonomy
in the wilderness and it identifies the connection between his personal story and the
American conception of wilderness as a site of independence and non-conformism
which has roots in the United States Declaration of Independence from the 1774.
At the end of the eighteenth century, after asserting their autonomy, Americans
started using wilderness as a symbol of future and potential. It was seen as their asset
which differentiated them from their European ancestors, and the direction west, to-
wards wilderness, was the direction which signified a separation from the past and a
movement towards greater independence. In the words of Henry Nash Smith, “[t]he
American interior [was] presented as a new and enchanting region of inexpressible
beauty and fertility. Through stately forests and rich meadows roam[ed] vast herds of
animals which own[ed] no master, nor expect[ed] their sustenance from the hands of
man” (12). In the eighteenth century, the Western wilderness functioned as a medium
to articulate the separation from the constraints of British rule. This meaning was later
transformed into a more universal symbol of freedom and autonomy which began to
be applied to various situations in which a constraining authority played a role. Wil-
derness thus started serving many non-conforming individuals who were dissatisfied
with their present state to articulate their separation from the status quo. In the 1990s,
when McCandless was writing his manifesto, this symbolism was still alive.
54
It is then not surprising that when McCandless embarked on his journey, he chose
the American West as his first destination. In his review of the book Into the Wild, David
Stevenson states that “the map of North America printed on the back of the cover [of
Into the Wild] with the dotted lines of McCandless’s trail looks very familiar. The lines
look much like the trail of all westward pioneers from . . . Lewis and Clark, to . . . Jack
Kerouac” (56). Like Lewis and Clark, Kerouac, but also Thoreau, Whitman, Muir and
other wilderness aficionados before him, McCandless held the American West in high
regard and he shared their beliefs in its transformative powers. As he wrote in his man-
ifesto, he “ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA [where he] SHALT NOT RETURN, 'CAUSE ‘THE
WEST IS THE BEST’” (McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163). In another in-
stance, writing to a friend who he met during his travels, McCandless writes: “Ron, I
really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City . . . and start seeing some
of the great work that God has done here in the American West” (qtd. in Krakauer, Into
the Wild 58). However, at the time when McCandless was exploring the American West,
it was no longer constituted of the uninhabited wilderness which used to be its defining
characteristic. The “fabled land where the restless pioneer moves ever forward, set-
tling one frontier after another; where the American character becomes self-reliant,
democratic, and endlessly eager for the new” (Worster, “New West” 141) was, in the
1990s, already a thing of the past.
Since McCandless did not find any real wilderness in the West of the United States
that could serve his needs, he turned his attention to “THE GREAT WHITE NORTH”
(McCandless, qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163). By the time he embarked on what he
55
called his “Alaskan Odyssey” (qtd. in Krakauer 56), Alaska had already been fashioned
into an enticing paradise for wilderness enthusiasts, which Roderick Nash called “a
wilderness mecca” (275). This was especially true for the interior of the state which
was defined by extreme environmental conditions that made it difficult for people to
modify the region and adapt it to human needs. “Inaccessible, mysterious, and more
rugged than the relatively temperate coastal region, the interior [of Alaska] could be
valued as a reservoir of wilderness which was rapidly draining away from the rest of
the United States” (Nash 283). Alaska therefore became a repository of the wilderness
that had been lost in the American West and as such, it was filled with cliches and con-
notations by which the symbolic Wild West used to be defined.
For this reason, Alaska has been repeatedly labeled the nation’s “Last Frontier”
(Nash 272) which is a denomination filled with meanings and associations. As Susan
Kollin states in her essay “The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, Nationalist Ecologies,
and Alaska,” “Alaska has come to signify the nation’s future, reopening the western
American frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner declared closed in the 1890s . . . like
previous mythic frontiers, it promises to provide the nation with further opportunities
for renewal” (43). Alaska thus came to represent the continuation of the frontier myth
which presented adventurers like McCandless with an opportunity to experience the
wilderness conditions no longer available in the rest of the United States. In the Last
Frontier, they could once again become pioneers and undergo the “rebirth” which
Frederick Jackson Turner in his Frontier Thesis identified as a dominant characteristic
of Americanness.
56
When it comes to the portrayal of Alaska as the Last Frontier, American literature
was a significant contributing factor. In this regard, Kollin identifies the leading Amer-
ican preservationists John Muir and Robert Marshall as writers who were “largely re-
sponsible for situating Alaska as a limitless geography of opportunity and adventure”
(46) and in her view, their “writings have helped ensure that even today, Alaska is still
entangled in cliches that present it as a kind of blank slate or empty spot on the map”
(46). This is certainly true as far as nature writing is concerned, but McCandless’s view
of Alaska was more inspired by popular fiction writers, primarily Jack London. Apart
from the aforementioned manifesto, two other carvings signed by Alexander Super-
tramp were found at the location of the bus in which McCandless died. One of them
reads “Jack London is King” (qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 9) and the other references
London’s The Call of the Wild: “All Hail The Primordial Beast!” (qtd. in Krakauer, Into
the Wild 38). Evidently, London had a formative influence on McCandless, and it is
highly probable that he played a significant role in McCandless’s veneration of the
“GREAT WHITE NORTH.”
Noting the influence of London’s work on the young adventurer, Jonah Raskin
writes that “McCandless couldn’t have picked a popular writer more fascinated with
the wild than London. The author of The Call of the Wild and dozens of cautionary tales
about men in the wild, like ‘To Build a Fire,’ London took on the persona of the wild
man, and it brought him wealth and fame, just as the American frontier was declared
closed” (199). Jack London published most of his work in the early 1900s, just a decade
after Turner’s Frontier Thesis, and his stories, most of which celebrated Alaska’s
57
primitive conditions, certainly helped reopen the American frontier and move it to the
North. According to Nash, London portrayed Alaska as “a more vital, stronger and gen-
erally superior world” (156) and he “saw value in [its] toughness for people in search
of challenge” (285). His The Call of the Wild, a story of a domesticated dog whom Alaska
transformed into “the dominant primordial beast” (London 36) clearly demonstrated
the transformative powers of the northern wilderness which enticed McCandless and
other adventurers like him.
Because of his veneration of the West and the Great White North, and his decision
to explore what Kollin called “the last remaining wild places on the [American] map”
(47), McCandless can be regarded as a self-appointed pioneer who, in the words of
Kollin, “fashioned himself into a modern-day American Adam determined to explore
the nation’s ‘Last Frontier.’” (41). This, together with the undeniable imprint of Roman-
ticism and Henry David Thoreau on his conception of wilderness, demonstrates that
McCandless’s desire to flee civilization and “BECOME LOST IN THE WILD” (McCandless,
qtd. in Krakauer, Into the Wild 163) was driven by the ideological forces present in
American culture. McCandless’s manifesto expresses a conception of wilderness that
is far from neutral; quite the contrary, it is filled with clichés and symbols that the con-
cept of wilderness had been infused with by numerous writers, preservationists and
wilderness enthusiasts who came before McCandless. The wilderness that he sought
was a cultural symbol and a social construct that had been long in the making and that
enticed many young adventurers before him to go search for truth in the wilderness.
58
3.2 Krakauer’s Christopher McCandless: A Portrait of a Hero
As has been mentioned before, Christopher McCandless would have remained an
anonymous adventurer if it was not for Jon Krakauer who decided to convert his story
into a non-fiction book. McCandless might have been a follower of the wilderness doc-
trine, but it was Krakauer who transformed him into a hero and promoted his wilder-
ness adventure as something worthy of respect and admiration. Vann claims that “Into
the Wild is most remarkable as an act of sympathy, every attempt made to understand
why McCandless walked into the wilderness” (ix). However, Krakauer’s “sympathy”
can be mostly attributed to the fact that he was a believer in the same wilderness myth
as McCandless, and by portraying the young adventurer as a hero, he was presenting
the wilderness doctrine as something inherently positive and worthy of pursuing. In
his essay about McCandless, Ivan Hodes writes that “people don’t really care about
Chris McCandless, the young man from Virginia who died on the Stampede Trail; they
are invested in Chris McCandless as a symbol” (101). For many people, McCandless is
a symbol of a larger cultural force—the wilderness doctrine—and by criticizing or cel-
ebrating McCandless, they virtually express their opinion on the American conception
of wilderness as a whole. Krakauer’s admiration of McCandless is a reflection of his
positive view of the American wilderness myth, and by popularizing McCandless, he
reifies and perpetuates that myth.
It should be acknowledged that reconstructing McCandless’s story could not have
been an easy task. As Bill Gifford emphasizes, Krakauer was “[w]orking with precious
few clues (and, obviously, no interview)” and still managed to provide a “detailed
59
account of McCandless’s troubled, troubling life” (77). Since Krakauer’s access to infor-
mation and to the young man’s thought process was rather limited, telling the story in
its completeness required an intrusion in order to compensate for the missing pieces
of information. Krakauer’s input is therefore significant, which is a fact that drove some
researches to claim that “Into the Wild is not actually a book about Chris McCandless
[but] about one complicated, interesting, troubled guy (Jon Krakauer) trying to under-
stand and process the early death of another” (Hodes 104). While there is some truth
to that statement, Into the Wild is, in fact, a story about McCandless since he left behind
a considerable amount of journal entries, notes and witnesses to provide Krakauer’s
narrative with some substance. Nevertheless, it was Jon Krakauer who provided an
evaluation of McCandless’s story and who idealized his journey and turned him into a
hero. He depicted his hero’s adventure as a courageous journey of a well-educated ide-
alist, and hence perpetuated the wilderness myth that cost McCandless his life.
Krakauer first published his story in 1993 as an article in the Outside magazine
and he received numerous responses from both admirers and critics of McCandless.
The young adventurer’s story proved to be compelling but polarizing and there were
many critics who argued that, as Krakauer summarized it, “McCandless was simply one
more dreamy half-cocked greenhorn who went into the country expecting to find an-
swers to all his problems and instead found only mosquitoes and a lonely death” (Into
the Wild 72). In Into the Wild, Krakauer quotes one of these critics—an Alaskan school-
teacher Nick Jans—at length:
60
Over the past 15 years, I’ve run into several McCandless types out in the country.
Same story: idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, un-
derestimated the country, and ended up in trouble. McCandless was hardly
unique; there’s quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike
that they’re almost a collective cliché. (71, emphasis added)
Here, Jans stresses that McCandless’s story was not in any way singular. Instead, he
portrays him as a typical representation of “a collective cliché” and thus criticizes not
only McCandless’s personal foolishness, but also the pervasive cultural force that in-
spires many other young people like him to go search for truth in the Alaskan wilder-
ness. For Jans, like for many others, McCandless functions as a symbol of something
larger—whether it is called a collective cliché or the American wilderness doctrine.
But unlike McCandless’s critics, Krakauer writes about him with respect and ad-
miration. He emphasizes his intelligence, courage and morality and dismisses any
claims that would counter this perspective. In his view, McCandless “wasn’t a nutcase,
he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. McCandless was something else—although
precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps” (Krakauer, Into the Wild 85). Never-
theless, Krakauer is aware that McCandless’s desire to get lost in the wilderness was
not unique. In an interview with Charlie Rose, he calls wilderness adventure “an Amer-
ican fantasy” and he speaks about risk taking in the wilderness as a “classic rite of pas-
sage.” He likens McCandless’s adventure to John Muir, Huckleberry Finn and “other lit-
erary examples” and thus clearly expresses that he does not view McCandless’s journey
as one of a kind, but rather as a part of something larger. In Into the Wild, he claims: “In
trying to understand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects
61
as well: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination [and] the allure high-risk
activities hold for young men of a certain mind” (Krakauer xx). This reflection led him
to people like Everett Ruess to whom he dedicates a whole chapter, but also to his own
past adventures in Alaska which he perceives as being driven by the same forces and
ideas as those that impacted McCandless. Krakauer thus situates McCandless in a
larger context of the American fascination with the wild that is not individual but na-
tional. McCandless’s story then emerges as a part of a larger American story of national
enthusiasm for wilderness.
Therefore, Krakauer exposes the American wilderness cult and demonstrates that
he is aware of the pervasiveness and attractiveness of the wilderness myth but, unlike
Jans, he portrays it as something positive and attractive. Their conflicting views on
McCandless are largely a matter of perspective and they mirror their opinions on the
larger issue—the American conception of wilderness. Hodes argues that
“[McCandless] symbolizes different, conflicting things for different people, and . . . what
we read into McCandless has much to do with the way we perceive Alaska and its fu-
ture” (101). While this is true, since Alaska and its status of “the Last Frontier” is now-
adays at the center of the wilderness debate, McCandless’s story, and the way different
people view it, reflects the American fascination with wilderness—and the range of
opinions surrounding it—in general.
With the help of Krakauer, McCandless became a hero, “a high-minded idealist”
(Stevenson 52) and “a remarkable character” (Gifford 77) worthy of admiration, who
inspired other young people to follow his leads and go search for truth in the
62
wilderness. Nevertheless, portraying McCandless as a hero has consequences. It means
to celebrate the American wilderness myth and it can be viewed as an attempt to pre-
serve it. And while there are many reasons why some Americans want to preserve their
traditional conception of wilderness—e.g., Vann writes: “The romantic call of wilder-
ness cannot be considered laughable . . . because it is so pervasive and enduring, linked
to things as large as Americans’ sense of their goodness despite the evidence to the
contrary. The wilderness is the bank of our goodness” (x)—many critics and academics
draw attention to the fact that the American conception of wilderness is inherently
paradoxical, exclusive and harmful to the environment. Into the Wild serves as evi-
dence that the American wilderness myth is still alive and perpetuated, but the ques-
tion is whether it should remain that way. As will be demonstrated in the next chapter,
to view wilderness as a repository of American goodness, independence and excep-
tionalism is to ignore all the paradoxes which the myth encompasses.
When Christopher McCandless went to the Alaskan wilderness, he was inspired
by the American wilderness idea which had been fashioned by writers like Henry Da-
vid Thoreau, John Muir, Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, Jack London, and many others.
Although he viewed wilderness as a natural space outside of the forces of civilization,
his idea of wilderness was primarily informed by American culture. The story of
McCandless ultimately demonstrates the power of ideas, especially when they are per-
petuated by multiple authors of multiple generations. Even today, wilderness is still
63
conceived as an antipode to civilization which offers solace from the ills of society and
has transformative powers on the human mind and body. By publishing Into the Wild,
Krakauer was one of the contributors who helped reify this idea and continue spread-
ing the myth. Nevertheless, the next chapter deconstructs the American wilderness
idea and attempts to uncover its many paradoxes and its problematic legacy. Even
though wilderness is, more often than not, associated with nature, chaos, and lack of
human control, by the end of the third chapter it should be clear that the American
wilderness is rather a reflection of American culture. And therefore, by going to wil-
derness, McCandless was not escaping civilization, but following the problematic ideal
which it created.
64
THE LEGACY OF THE (PARADOXICAL) W ILDERNESS MYTH
4 The Legacy of the (Paradoxical) Wilderness Myth
By the time Krakauer was writing Into the Wild, the American wilderness idea had al-
ready been significantly scrutinized and criticized by academics like Roderick Nash,
William Cronon, and many others. In popular literature, wilderness was still being por-
trayed as a romantic place outside of civilization which offered spiritual transfor-
mation and the mythical pioneer experience. In academic literature, however, the wil-
derness idea started being depicted as a paradoxical myth which had precarious foun-
dations, and which was proving to be unsustainable. This chapter analyzes the para-
doxes of the wilderness idea and its legacy. Its aim is to argue that Krakauer’s idealiza-
tion of McCandless’s journey is problematic because it perpetuates a wilderness idea
which is inherently contradictory. Moreover, the idea is controversial because it pop-
ularizes the wilderness experience and drives increasing numbers of people into wil-
derness which leads to its overcrowding and the ultimate loss of its wild characteris-
tics. In the chapter, three main paradoxes of wilderness, all of which manifest in one
way or another in the story of Christopher McCandless, will be analyzed. They will
demonstrate that wilderness, despite being presented as a place outside of civilization,
is actually a product constructed, managed and commercialized by the exact same civ-
ilization which McCandless was trying to escape.
This chapter will analyze the following three paradoxes: Firstly, the paradox of
wilderness being conceived as a virgin land. This view requires a lot of imagination and
willful ignorance to sustain, and it is historically incorrect as America was not an empty
landscape even in 1492 when it was first “discovered.” Secondly, the paradox of
65
popular wilderness, which motivates growing numbers of people to go experience
their wilderness adventure. By driving people into wilderness, the “virgin land” is be-
coming overcrowded and thus less and less wild. Wilderness has often been conceived
of as a place beyond the capitalistic and materialistic forces of American society, but
the opposite is true—the wilderness idea is a cultural product that is as much subject
to American commercialism as any material commodity. It can be bought and sold in
the form of literature, films, magazines, paintings, commercial trips, etc., and Into the
Wild represents one of the products which romanticizes and publicizes the wilderness
experience and thus continues spreading the wilderness idea. Thirdly, the chapter de-
constructs the paradox of “the wilderness management” which ensures that wilder-
ness is protected but is in direct conflict with the conception of wilderness as an un-
controllable place that functions as a site of social nonconformism. In this part, it will
be stressed that wilderness management is necessary, and that the protection of wil-
derness requires responsibility and restraint. And since the wilderness idea is mostly
spread by literature, it will be posited that the responsibility for wilderness should be
taken not only by politicians but also by writers and readers.
4.1 Constructing the Virgin Land: Removing Humans from Nature
Various scholars have indicated that to view wilderness as an antithesis to civili-
zation is inherently paradoxical because it makes wilderness elusive and virtually un-
attainable. As Cronon argues: “[W]ilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the
human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature to be
66
true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall” (17). To
view wilderness as a place without people means that any human presence in the wil-
derness automatically destroys its wildness. This conception made sense during the
times when the advancement of the white man along the frontier line was viewed as
the transformation of wilderness into civilization, but even then it caused certain con-
tradictions; the wilderness that the pioneers were conquering was not, in fact, without
inhabitants. The Indigenous people, whom English settlers encountered in the New
World, presented a major threat to the myth of the virgin land. In order to solve this
issue, the frontiersmen imagined indigenous inhabitants as “wild men” or “savages”
(Nash 28) and thus as a part of the wild landscape. Consequently, the dualistic vision
of wilderness and civilization became reflected in the similarly dualistic opposition be-
tween the “wild Indians” and the “civilized Europeans.”
Later, during the times when first national parks were being established, the white
Americans devised a solution that was even more radical, and they removed the Indig-
enous people from the places which they desired to transform into national parks. In
his essay “Dispossessing the Wilderness” about Indigenous people in the Yosemite Na-
tional Park, Mark Spence states that “Americans are able to cherish their national parks
today only because Indians abandoned them involuntarily or were forcibly removed
to reservations” (27). In essence, to create wilderness, its inhabitants first had to be
removed. On this issue, Cronon comments: “The removal of Indians to create an ‘unin-
habited wilderness’—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—
reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really
67
is” (15-16). In order to sustain the myth of wilderness as an uninhabited virgin land,
the wilderness first had to be unpeopled, either imaginatively or by actually removing
the inhabitants from the landscapes, and thus become “wild.” This apparent contradic-
tion only demonstrates that wilderness is a cultural construct just as much as it is a
natural place.
Another paradox, which is tightly connected to this one, is the conception of wil-
derness as terra incognita, or the land unknown. As O’Grady rightly argues, “[t]he terra
incognita so called is not the true wild because it can be named and thereby known.
The wild is always just out of reach: it withdraws before this sentence” (14). Any land
that is proclaimed unknown, is, in O’Grady’s view, already known or at least knowable,
which highlights the elusive nature of wilderness. The American pioneers who were
searching for the unknown landscape could never find it, because once it was found, it
was no longer unknown. This, however, did not present a major issue, since the goal of
the successful pioneer was to be the first one to find, to know, and to name a particular
place.
What did present an issue, however, was that by the time frontiersmen reached
their “terra incognita,” it had often already been named, either by Indigenous people
or previous pioneers. This often led to erasure of old names and their replacement.
Consequently, Tissiak became Half Dome, Tutokanula became El Capitan, and so on
(Salcedo-Chourré 7). In his book Alaska Days with John Muir, Samuel Hall Young writes
about discovering a massive glacier in Alaska during his travels with John Muir. Young
states: “Without consulting me, Muir named this ‘Young Glacier,’ and right proud was
68
I to see that name on the charts for the next ten years or more . . . but later maps have
a different name. Some ambitious young ensign on a surveying vessel, perhaps, stole
my glacier, and later charts give it the name of Dawes” (147). These acts of renaming,
remapping and reconquering illustrate that the unknown land the pioneers were
searching for was seldom truly unknown, and discovering the terra incognita thus of-
ten required a bit of willful ignorance or intentional rediscovering.
When Christopher McCandless began searching for his own unknown land in
1992, there was no longer any area in the United States that would not be named and
mapped. But, as Krakauer states, “[McCandless], with his idiosyncratic logic, came up
with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map. In his own mind,
if nowhere else, the terra would thereby remain incognita” (Into the Wild 174).
McCandless’s case, therefore, was not one of remapping, but one of unmapping. By dis-
missing the map, he was able to remain ignorant of any signs of civilization in the area
surrounding him: “Less than thirty miles to the east [was] a major thoroughfare, the
George Parks Highway. Just sixteen miles to the south . . . hundreds of tourists rum-
ble[d] daily into Denali Park . . . And unbeknownst to the Aesthetic Voyager, scattered
within a six-mile radius of the bus [were] four cabins” (Krakauer, Into the Wild 165).
According to Krakauer, the wilderness which McCandless found “scarcely qualifies as
wilderness by Alaska standards” (Into the Wild 165), but thanks to his willful ignorance
and imaginary unpeopling, McCandless managed to find a place which was, at least in
his mind, wild enough for his purposes.
69
The need to unmap, remap, unpeople or otherwise transform the landscape in or-
der to create the kind of “wilderness” that would reflect the idea of wilderness as an
antithesis to civilization, illustrates how unnatural this dualistic conception really is.
The view of wilderness as a “virgin” or “pristine” landscape is a myth which is prevalent
in American art and literature, but which is ultimately false. The conception of wilder-
ness as an uninhabited virgin landscape that functions as an antipode to civilization
and serves non-conforming individuals to express their dissatisfaction with society, is
a part of the American wilderness idea which is socially constructed and inherently
paradoxical. If any trace of human agency disqualifies a place from being called wilder-
ness, then the existence of wilderness in America (or anywhere in the world, for that
matter) is a thing of history. And since wilderness has become a popular concept which
attracts multitudes of adventurers, finding solitude in wilderness is becoming increas-
ingly more difficult every year. The popularity of wilderness drives a growing number
of people into it and is therefore in danger of becoming overcrowded. And since wil-
derness filled with visitors is very far from the original idea of the virgin land, wilder-
ness is in danger of vanishing completely. It could even be argued that it had already
vanished.
4.2 The Wilderness Industry: From Popular to Vanishing Wilderness
The American wilderness idea is enticing—it promises an escape from the ills
of society, far from the forces of civilization. Therefore, when Christopher McCandless
decided to escape the materialistic forces of American capitalism, he thought about
70
wilderness as being exempt from commerce, functioning as a true antipode to capital-
ism. However, the opposite is true; even though wilderness is often viewed as a natural
space that is not subject to commerce, it is actually cleverly marketed under the dis-
guise of being a natural resource that offers a solace from the over-civilized world. In
“The Wilderness Narrative and the Cultural Logic of Capitalism,” Carl Talbot argues
that “‘[w]ilderness,’ or rather the ideal of it, is a valuable commodity which is traded
on the international market” (329) and that “the idea of wilderness . . . plays a vital role
in the cultural logic of capitalism” (330). In making these comments, Talbot makes
clear that the idea of wilderness as existing outside of capitalism is false. In the same
way as other commercial products, the wilderness idea is continually being sold and
bought. Literature and films play a major role in this, and McCandless is a typical ex-
ample of an individual who got indoctrinated with the wilderness idea through Amer-
ican literature.
In Into the Wild, McCandless is portrayed as an educated individual with a pas-
sion for reading. One of the people he met on his journey was a tramp Jan Burres, to
whom he helped with selling used books. Krakauer quotes Burres as saying: “Alex was
big on the classics: Dickens, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Jack London. London was his fa-
vorite” (Into the Wild 43-44), to which Krakauer adds that “McCandless had been infat-
uated with London since childhood,” resonating with his “fervent condemnation of
capitalist society [and] his glorification of the primordial world” (Into the Wild 44). As
has been mentioned earlier, McCandless also read Thoreau (Krakauer, Into the Wild
71
47) and by consuming these classics, he was absorbing the wilderness idea which was,
although sometimes unintentionally, marketed by these literary productions.
In her essay “In Search of the Sublime,” Diana L. Di Stefano stresses the impact of
literature and magazine production on solidifying the idea of the Mountain West as a
place of spiritual and transformative powers: “Stories about the Mountain West that
celebrated risky behavior added momentum to beliefs promoting the importance of
interacting with mountains, especially western mountains, in dangerous ways in order
to attain spiritual rejuvenation” (12). In this way, the Mountain West, and with it the
wilderness idea, was marketed and spread, giving rise to what can be called a wilder-
ness industry. People like Muir, Marshall and London then helped depict Alaska as the
nation’s “Last Frontier” and thus posit it as the place where these wilderness experi-
ences were readily attainable. McCandless may have thought that he was fleeing from
civilization and capitalism by going into the wilderness, but he was actually driven by
exactly the same civilization and the commercial forces he was trying to escape.
Once wilderness was transformed into a desirable place worth seeking, its com-
mercial potential quickly became apparent, and people started capitalizing from sell-
ing its scenic wonders and transformative experiences. The wilderness idea which was
originally sold by Transcendentalists, preservationists and other wilderness aficiona-
dos, started proliferating into magazines, films and television programs. Commenting
upon this phenomenon, Hansses claims that a “modern-day frontiersman is a pop-cul-
ture hero, such as The Discovery Channel’s ‘Survivorman,’ who ‘is set down in a de-
serted wilderness and left to fend entirely for himself with no food, no fresh water, no
72
shelter and no matches.’” (196). She also mentions an existence of what she calls “‘sur-
vival tourism’ services’” (196) which provide consumers who wish to experience the
frontier conditions with the primitive wilderness experience. The existence of these
services exposes wilderness as something that is not outside of commerce. Although it
may seem paradoxical, wilderness is a commodity that is sold on the market, both as
an idea and as an experience.
If wilderness is viewed as a commercial product, Into the Wild emerges as one of
the literary productions which sell the wilderness idea to other consumers. Told as a
romantic story of an escape from the ills of society, Into the Wild repeats the conception
of wilderness as an antidote to civilization, and it popularizes the wilderness experi-
ence as something worthy of seeking. Since the publication of Krakauer’s book, and
later Penn’s movie, many admirers of McCandless decided to follow his steps. Conse-
quently, the abandoned “Magic Bus” (McCandless, qtd. Krakauer, Into the Wild 163), in
which he died, has become a sort of secular “pilgrimage site” (Levenson). It enticed
multiples of inexperienced hikers who wanted to pay tribute to McCandless by putting
themselves in his shoes and reliving his Alaskan adventure. Nevertheless, not all of
them managed to reach the bus without issues. On August 14, 2010, Claire Jane Acker-
mann, a 29-year-old woman from Switzerland, drowned while trying to cross the
Teklanika River on the Stampede Trail (Mowry 133). Like many people before her, she
was hiking towards the infamous “Magic Bus,” but she never reached it.
Eventually, in June 2020, after “15 bus-related search-and-rescue operations”
(LaCount) and two cases of people drowning in the Teklanika River (Levenson), the
73
decision was made to remove the “Magic Bus” from its location in the Alaskan wilder-
ness in order to prevent other fatal accidents. Consequently, on June 18, the Alaska
National Guard airlifted the bus from the Stampede Trail in an attempt to “reduce or
eliminate the hazard” associated with it (LaCount). Since the bus and its symbolic
meaning proved to be cherished by so many tourists and wilderness enthusiasts, the
vehicle found a new permanent location at the University of Alaska Museum of the
North (Osborne) where it has been “installed as an exhibition to immortalize it’s [sic]
many stories” (Osborne). There it remains to this day, preserving the symbolism with
which it has been infused since McCandless’s passing, and showing that books, films
and other forms of media are powerful ways to spread the wilderness idea.
Christopher McCandless and his “Magic Bus” were also referenced in other liter-
ary works and their legacy managed to cross the Atlantic and inspire adventurers out-
side of the United States. In a book Saudade: Na kole a v kajaku kolem světa [Saudade:
Around the World on a Bike and in a Kayak], Czech writer Matěj Balga writes about his
journey to the “Magic Bus,“ acknowledging the fact that the bus was the main reason
he went to Alaska. He claims that after Penn’s film version of Into the Wild McCandless
became a legend among travelers and inspired thousands of young people to start ex-
ploring the world (154). Once at the bus, Balga describes the place with romantic ad-
miration. He discovers hundreds of notes that McCandless’s devotees engraved into
walls and ponders the meaning of the place for himself and other people whom
McCandless inspired (162). In Balga’s depiction, the bus functions as a symbol of cour-
age to escape the routine of civilization and start living a meaningful life on the road or
74
in the wilderness. It is an account that is fairly typical among McCandless’s admirers,
and one that continues romanticizing the idea of wilderness spread by Into the Wild.
“The Magic Bus” story demonstrates the extent of McCandles’s impact. Into the
Wild undeniably drove many followers of McCandless into wilderness, whether they
chose the bus on the Stampede Trail or a different place as their destination. The num-
ber of people inspired by McCandless is not recorded, but the enduring power of the
story shows that the impact was not little. Jon Krakauer and Sean Penn managed to
refashion and continue spreading the American wilderness idea which had already
driven many young people into wilderness before and will continue enticing them as
long as stories like McCandles’s are being published. The impact of Into the Wild ulti-
mately illustrates that wilderness adventurers are often motivated by ideas that are
spread by literature and films, and authors of these cultural productions thus carry a
lot of responsibility to present wilderness in such a way that causes the least possible
damage. However, even though the future of wilderness is uncertain, the American wil-
derness idea is still being repeated. Wilderness may not exist anymore, but it continues
being presented as an enticing place which people seek when they wish to escape civ-
ilization and consumerism, undergo a personal or spiritual transformation, and per-
haps find the “truth” which McCandless and many of his followers were searching for.
4.3 Controlling the Uncontrollable Wild: The Necessary Paradox of

the Wilderness Management
Since 1964, the American wilderness has been managed by the National Wil-
derness Preservation System (Nash 5) which was established under the Wilderness
75
Act (Nash 200). Although from the etymological view, wilderness implies characteris-
tics like “self-willed, willful, or uncontrollable” (Nash 1)—which are adjectives often
used in defining it—wilderness is, in reality, subject to restrictions and government
control. In his essay “Wilderness, Myth, and American Character,“ Marvin Henberg dis-
cusses the many paradoxes of the American wilderness idea, and he states: “There is a
joke among employees of the U.S. Forest Service—many of whom opposed passage of
the 1964 Wilderness Act—that prior to 1964 only God could make wilderness but now
only the U.S. Congress can” (41). The idea of controlling something wild, and retaining
its wild characteristics while doing so, seems altogether absurd and contradictory. For
this reason, Henberg claims that the “‘wilderness management’’ is “a paradox if ever
there was one” (42). Nevertheless, the idea of controlling wilderness may be contra-
dictory, but it is also necessary. If wilderness was not managed, it is highly likely that
it would have already vanished completely—but the question is whether something
that is controlled can still be called wild.
Since the American wilderness is conceived as an antipode to civilization, it of-
ten functions as a site of non-conformism and rebellion. After all, it has been histori-
cally defined as a place of freedom and independence. Therefore, people like Thoreau
and McCandless use wilderness to express their dissatisfaction with the American so-
ciety and government. In Into the Wild, McCandless is portrayed as an individual who
opposes all kinds of rules and laws. When the Alaskan who drives him to the edge of
the Denali Park asks him whether he has a hunting license, McCandless allegedly re-
sponds: “Hell, no . . . How I feed myself is none of the government’s business”
76
(Krakauer, Into the Wild 6). In another instance, he ignores all regulations and drives
his car—whose registration had long expired—to the Detrital Wash (Krakauer, Into
the Wild 28). Krakauer explains his behavior by saying that “he took as gospel [Tho-
reau’s] essay ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’ and thus considered it his moral re-
sponsibility to flout the laws of the state” (Krakauer, Into the Wild 28). By making this
connection between the transcendentalist author and McCandless, Krakauer calls at-
tention to the fact that the rejection of laws and restrictions is a deep-rooted part of
the American wilderness idea.
However, to view wilderness as a site of freedom and independence that is out-
side of government control is problematic. The main reason why wilderness is man-
aged by the government today, is that without protection, wilderness would likely be
exploited and destroyed. In the words of Worster, “a passion for wilderness that is a
passion for absolute freedom leaves itself open to the most dangerous force at loose
on the planet today, corporate capital in a global economy” (“Thoreau” 11-12). Alt-
hough wilderness enthusiasts like McCandless would like to believe that wilderness
exists outside of civilization, and hence beyond its economic and political forces, it is
not the case. Were it not for John Muir and his followers who established the Wilder-
ness Society and who demanded protection and management of American wilderness,
there would most probably be no National Parks and not much remaining wilderness
in America today.
Protecting wilderness has always been a political issue in which the economic util-
ity of wild landscape played a significant role. At the time when Muir was advocating
77
for the protection of wilderness, he needed to convince the public and the American
government of the inherent value of wilderness. In the words of Oravec, “Muir suc-
ceeded for some of his readers in undermining their conventional belief in material
progress and substituting activity in behalf of the immeasurable quality of the sublime”
(257-258). Muir’s writings were often written with an aim to popularize wilderness,
present it as valuable in its own right, and advocate for its preservation. In the age of
material progress and rapid economic development, this was not an easy task. But
eventually, the National Wilderness Preservation System was established and “did ac-
cord wild country unprecedented national recognition as a desirable component of the
American landscape” (Nash 200). The wilderness was saved from further development
and preserved for further generations, but despite promising freedom and independ-
ence, its preservation had required politics, restrictions and laws.
However, after the initial success, another issue arose. The popularity of wilder-
ness, which “contributed to saving wilderness areas from development” (Nash 316),
eventually became the very thing which threatened the wild landscapes. In the chapter
called “The Irony of Victory”, Nash argues that “wilderness could be well loved to
death” (316), meaning that it could be endangered by the multitudes of enthusiasts
who come to wilderness to experience their transformative adventures. Such an extent
of popularity necessitated limitations even within the wilderness areas, controlling the
behavior of adventurers themselves. In Penn’s adaptation of Into the Wild, the director
added a scene in which McCandless discovers that there is a twelve-year waitlist to get
a permit to paddle down the Colorado River. After being told that he can either wait
78
for over a decade for the permit or join a commercial raft trip that would cost him two
thousand dollars, McCandless decides to ignore the regulations and navigate the river
without the permit. The scene clearly depicts the regulations as absurd, with
McCandless smirking at the officer and eventually breaking the law.
The anecdote was added by Penn and was not based on either McCandless’s or
Krakauer’s accounts of the young man’s journey, although McCandless did, in fact, pad-
dle down the Colorado River (Krakauer, Into the Wild 32). Nevertheless, the anecdote
very well captures the tension that exists between the idea of wilderness management
and the aversion to rules which McCandless and other wilderness enthusiasts often
share. On the one hand, controlling the “uncontrollable” wilderness is contradictory
and paradoxical. On the other hand, as Nash emphasizes, even wilderness has a “car-
rying capacity” (323) and can absorb only a limited number of people. Nash considers
the case of the Colorado River from this perspective, and he uses it to demonstrate the
rising popularity of wilderness adventures and the necessity to manage them: “After
the 1972 season when an astonishing 16,432 persons floated through the Grand Can-
yon, the National Park Service realized it had a problem on its hands as potentially
damaging to the wilderness qualities of the place” (Nash 332). Wilderness manage-
ment may be a paradox, but it is necessary—although it raises a question whether the
wilderness that is controlled can be still called a wilderness.
Commenting on the issue of wilderness management, Donald Worster writes that
wilderness “requires not more freedom, but more responsibility. It requires limita-
tions. It requires far more restraint—self-restraint ideally, but community restraint if
79
necessary. It requires citizenship. It requires politics.” (“Thoreau,” 13). The paradox of
wilderness management shows that wilderness, despite being portrayed as an anti-
pode to civilization that exists outside of the forces of government, is, in fact, a political
issue. And it needs to remain a political issue, if wilderness is to be preserved. However,
the responsibility of protecting wilderness should be taken not only by politicians but
also by writers and readers. This chapter demonstrated that literature has an over-
whelming impact on the creation and spreading of the problematic wilderness idea. If
the conception of wilderness is to change, the first thing that needs to be revolutionized
is the way wilderness is written about and thought about. Into the Wild is a typical ex-
ample of portraying wilderness in the most problematic, contradictory and unsustain-
able manner.
Even though many wilderness aficionados would like to think about wilderness
as an antipode to civilization which exists outside of society, politics and commerce, it
is not so. Rather than being the civilization’s antithesis, wilderness is fashioned, con-
trolled and monetized by civilization. In the words of William Cronon, throughout the
years of its making,
wilderness came to embody the national frontier myth, standing for the wild free-
dom of America’s past and seeming to represent a highly attractive natural alter-
native to the ugly artificiality of modern civilization. The irony, of course, was that
in the process wilderness came to reflect the very civilization its devotees sought
to escape. (15)
80
Today’s wilderness is a reflection of a cultural ideal: it had been conquered, unpeopled,
transformed into an uninhabited landscape, carefully managed, restricted, and capital-
ized. The nature that such wilderness offers is a “‘stylized spectacle’ packaged for easy
consumption” (Talbot 328) that has been significantly altered by people for human
use. Today’s wilderness is not a “virgin land” but a tourist destination. It is very far
from the original conception of wilderness, and it is in danger of vanishing completely
if it is not carefully protected. To follow in McCandless’s footsteps therefore ultimately
means following the American wilderness myth which is inherently paradoxical and
unsustainable—and which, for this reason, should be scrutinized and rethought.
81
CONCLUSION
5 Conclusion
All in all, the wilderness of Christopher McCandless, his biographer Jon Krakauer, and
all the admirers of Into the Wild, is an idealized and romanticized place, but it is ulti-
mately a myth. Instead of fulfilling its alleged function of an antipode to civilization, it
serves as a reflection of American culture and its problematic foundations—its excep-
tionalism, commercialism and ethnocentrism. However, unlike other myths, the idea
of wilderness is usually sold under the disguise of pristine nature and its adherents
thus often do not realize its precarious underpinnings. Consequently, in literature and
film, wilderness is often depicted uncritically, either as a landscape filled with sublime
beauty, or as a testing ground for young people who desire to experience the arche-
typal battle between man and nature. But these accounts often do not realize nature’s
fragility.
Into the Wild is a story which is immensely popular not only in the United States,
but also internationally. And although many of its critics expressed disapproval of
McCandless’s decisions and unpreparedness, criticizing the idealism and foolishness
which led him to his untimely death, not many considered the harmful effect his story
may have on wilderness itself. Nevertheless, the problem is not that people do not re-
alize the detrimental effects of the American wilderness myth—there are many studies
which deal with the issue, many of which have been cited in this thesis—but that the
discussion about wilderness is held almost exclusively in the academic sphere. No mat-
ter how fiercely people like William Cronon, Donald Worster or Roderick Nash criticize
82
CONCLUSION
the wilderness doctrine, popular books and films like Into the Wild seem to have a
much bigger impact on how wilderness is viewed and approached. However, this the-
sis would not have been written if its author did not believe that writing and thinking
about wilderness is beneficial—even though it is done in the academic sphere and
therefore may not reach and impact a wide readership.
The main point of this thesis was to stress that wilderness should be viewed crit-
ically, because nature is never really natural. Nature and culture intersect in ways that
are often disguised and difficult to see through, and it is therefore important to ap-
proach them as two intertwined concepts rather than antipodes. McCandless might
have been driven into the wild by the desire to escape civilization, but he did not suc-
ceed in this aim. The wilderness experience which he sought, and which ultimately cost
him his life, had been culturally constructed by multiple generations of American au-
thors—from Henry David Thoreau onwards. Seen in this way, Into the Wild is a notable
addition to the collection of wilderness texts, and just as Thoreau motivated
McCandless to go search for truth in the wilderness, McCandless’s story keeps inspiring
many other young adventurers to do the same.
Even though this thesis portrayed the idea of wilderness in a rather critical man-
ner, it should be stressed that its aim was not to dismantle it or advocate for the dis-
continuation of its use. The foundations of the wilderness myth may be problematic,
but the existence of the concept ensures that the preservation of wilderness is possible.
It provides wild nature with definite boundaries and enables its systematic protection.
The ultimate paradox of the wilderness myth may be that it drives crowds of people
83
CONCLUSION
into wilderness and thus contributes to its destruction, but this option is preferable to
the alternative: without the wilderness myth, wilderness would have never been set
aside and preserved. As Marvin Henberg argues:
Sometimes, thankfully, our ideals—erroneous and unflattering as they may ap-

pear under some lights—stir us to prefer the social good to the getting and spend-
ing by which we lay waste our individual powers. Since we must believe some-
thing about ourselves, I submit that belief in ourselves as a people shaped by wil-
derness is productive of greater good than of evil. (45)
The wilderness myth is culturally constructed and harmful to the environment, but
paradoxically, it is also the reason why American National Parks have been created.
Without it, the American wilderness would have become subject to much more de-
structive forces of economic progress and urbanization.
Nevertheless, the idea of wilderness should be rethought and redefined. It is not
in the scope of this thesis to provide alternatives to the American conception of wilder-
ness, but it is plausible to conclude with a suggestion. In the epilogue to the fifth edition
of Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash presents his vision for the future
of wilderness, and he claims that “[t]he point is to share rather than dominate the
Earth. It’s really just an extension to all life of the ethic of respect that we never learned
very well in kindergarten” (379). In Nash’s view, which the author of this thesis shares,
a revaluation of ethics is needed. If the conception of wilderness is to be reconstructed,
ethics needs to encompass human and non-human entities alike.
This idea is not new, but it still remains relatively marginal. In an article called
“Non-Anthropocentric Value Theory and Environmental Ethics” from 1984, J. Baird
84
CONCLUSION
Callicott advocates for a “paradigm shift in moral philosophy” (300), claiming that eth-
ics have traditionally been concerned with “[a]n anthropocentric value theory” which
“confers intrinsic value on human beings and regards all other things, including other
forms of life, as being only instrumentally valuable” (299). In other words, ethics have
always considered only human beings as morally valuable and dismissed all other
forms of life, which were a concern for ethics only if they affected the human realm.
Callicott then introduces the idea of “environmental ethics” which could “provide the-
oretical grounds for the moral standing or moral considerability of non-human natural
entities, natural communities, or nature as a whole” (300). Such a shift in thinking
about ethics could have a great impact on the idea of wilderness and broaden the scope
of possible ethical reasons for wilderness preservation.
The author of this thesis believes that the wilderness idea should be disengaged
from its predominant anthropocentrism and focus more on the one thing with which
it has always been associated: nature. Wilderness should be preserved not for human
use, but primarily for fauna, flora and the earth. Instead of being constructed as an un-
controllable, chaotic landscape that functions as a testing ground for young men or a
place of sublime beauty which can provide transformative experiences, wilderness
should be perceived as a fragile place which needs protection. It should therefore be
approached with restraint and humility—not as a medium for achieving greatness and
transcendence, but as a place which is valuable in its own right.
85
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FILOZOFICKÁ FAKULTA

Into the Wild:

BC. MICHAELA BUDÍNSKÁ

Vedoucí práce: Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.

Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Autor: Bc. Michaela Budínská

Author: Bc. Michaela Budínská

stavit americkou divočinu jako kulturní koncept s bohatou historií a problematickým

odkazem, a následně ukázat, že Útěk do divočiny je typickým příkladem toho, jak je

americké kultury a paradoxních mýtů, na nichž je vystavěna.

continues being perpetuated and reified. Instead of depicting wilderness as a natural

space which functions as an antipode to civilization, this thesis presents it as a reflec-

tion of American culture and the paradoxical myths on which it is built.

Brno November 28, 2023 .......................................

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel,

Šablona DP 3.4.2-ARTS-dipl-obor-anglicky (2022-11-28) © 2014, 2016, 2018–2021 Masarykova univerzita 9

2 The Development of the American Wilderness Myth 18

3 Into the Wild: The Wilderness Myth Followed and Perpetuated 45

4 The Legacy of the (Paradoxical) Wilderness Myth 65

people to seek their own wilderness adventures.

Commenting on McCandless’s impact, a Czech writer Matěj Balga claims: “Chris se

argues: “Wandering the country . . . with no phone, no car, no cigarettes, serves as a

and wilderness was the place where he hoped to find it.

The function of wilderness in McCandless’s story—and in American culture as a

opposite, the desire to go to wilderness in order to resist the materialistic forces of

civilization has a long tradition in American culture. Wilderness, although appearing

function as a site of independence and resistance where it is possible to achieve spir-

gument of this thesis therefore is that Christopher McCandless was driven to

wilderness which he was seeking, despite appearing natural, is a cultural concept

McCandless’s beliefs should be closely analyzed in order to reveal problematic doc-

trines on which they are built.

ness to English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and the ideologically

quintessentially American phenomenon, closely associated with the pioneer experi-

scape, the American wilderness emerges as a faithful reflection of American culture

and its beliefs.

as a continuation of the American wilderness myth. This section demonstrates that

by narrating and romanticizing his journey, Krakauer perpetuates the continually

repeated conception of wilderness as a site of resistance and independence. Introduc-

emerges as a part of a profoundly American phenomenon which continues being per-

petuated in American literature and film.

to be inherently contradictory but necessary if wilderness is to survive. The aim of this

section is to argue that the veneration of McCandless’s wilderness adventure is prob-

tributes to the continual disappearance of American wilderness. The conception of wil-

derness as an uninhabited landscape which functions as a site of freedom and inde-

pendence is ultimately a myth which is unsustainable and therefore should be scruti-

small piece of a larger American phenomenon. McCandless’s—and Krakauer’s—ado-

conception of wilderness in order to replace it with a more sustainable understanding,

derness, it contributes to its vanishing.

2 The Development of the American Wilderness Myth

with spiritual and nationalistic meaning.

An environmental historian Donald Worster, who wrote multiple papers on the

significance of wilderness in America, rightly notes that, “[s]omething in American cul-

ied in historical context, because even though it is so deep-rooted that it appears to be

nationalistic value that it carries to this day.

This chapter studies the development of the American conception of wilderness

wilderness is a reflection of multiple ideological doctrines—most importantly the con-

2.1 Early Years: The New World Wilderness as an Enemy

Despite today’s widespread enthusiasm about wilderness in America, the New

ble wasteland and a source of evil.

derness can be mainly attributed to the impact of Judeo-Christian tradition, which

which he captured these early sentiments:

Beyond the great Atlantick flood

stanza of Wigglesworth’s poem: